Health impacts from mercury typically occur from consumption of mercury-contaminated fish, but most mercury pollution is emitted to the atmosphere. Impacts from mercury pollution in the aquatic environment depend on atmospheric transport, chemistry, and deposition processes. In recent decades mercury oxidation and deposition of oxidized mercury compounds have been found to be particularly important steps in mercury biogeochemical cycling. Atmospheric oxidized mercury measurements are made routinely by dozens of research and regulatory groups around the country, and these measurements have informed recent regulatory efforts by EPA and other agencies. Currently, no commercially-available method exists for verifying atmospheric oxidized mercury measurements. Further, recent research has shown that commercial instruments for oxidized mercury do not report accurate measurements under some atmospheric conditions.
This team proposes to commercialize an automated calibration device that generates ultra-trace concentrations of gas-phase mercury compounds. The team has developed a permeation oven and flow and processing system to generate ultra-trace concentrations of gas-phase mercury compounds for calibration of atmospheric mercury equipment. It uses uniquely-designed permeation tubes to pass controlled amounts of mercury compounds into an inert gas stream. All wetted parts in the instrument are extremely inert and precisely heated to allow for quantitative passage of reactive and semi-volatile compounds. The system is designed for atmospheric mercury, but the technology can also be used for other reactive compounds.
For this project, we explored the commercial potential of a calibration device for reactive gas-phase compounds, including oxidized mercury compounds such as mercury bromide. Oxidized mercury compounds can deposit to aquatic ecosystems and accumulate in fish, allowing it to impact human health when humans consume fish. Oxidized mercury is measured in the ambient atmosphere by research groups and government agencies around the world. Unfortunately, oxidized mercury compounds are reactive and only semivolatile, so handling them is a challenge, and development of suitable technology for calibration of oxidized mercury measurements has proven elusive. This means that almost all measurements of oxidized mercury are currently unverified with calibration standards. We are developing and testing a calibration device for gas-phase oxidized mercury to alleviate this problem. Development of this device is being carried out with funds from a separate NSF grant. For the current project, we received support from NSF to learn about how to commercialize inventions and to explore the possibility of turning our calibration device into a commercial product. We learned a great deal about entrepreneurism and commercialization during the course of this project, and we interviewed more than 90 potential customers, instrument manufacturers, distributors, and others, which helped us determine whether our device could be a successful commercial product. Ultimately we decided that, while real demand exists for our device, the market size would be too small to justify creation of a company around just that one product. Instead, we plan to pursue licensure of the technology to an existing instrument manufacturer.
