This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project offers potentially enormous public health benefits while substantially reducing the costs of water quality monitoring. There are 1. 5 million monitoring sites in the U.S. mandated by either the Clean Water Act or the Safe Drinking Water Act. Current sampling and analysis techniques are extremely labor intensive and costly. Using today's methods, monitoring costs frequently exceed remediation costs. More importantly, the current practice doesn't detect spikes, surges, or spills which, if undetected, can create the huge expense of cleanup or worse. This project centers on a low-cost, continuous on-line monitor to detect the presence of heavy metals, nitrates, and other pollutants in public water supplies and wastewater effluents, and to provide uninterrupted "spike detection" for more than 100 toxic substances. It combines two proven technologies. The research objectives will determine (1) how well the two technologies will each perform their intended function when working together, and (2) how robust the invention is, i.e., over what range of selected parameters will the invention perform its intended function. The technology will have broad applicability in municipal water and wastewater treatment systems, process industries, other significant industrial users, and filtration applications.
