This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will develop cost-effective optical fiber sensors for rapid detection of petroleum and microbial activity during bioremediation of contaminated sites. Hazardous chemicals are found to contaminate the ground at fuel exploration, production, refinement, and storage sites. Bioremediation techniques are now used to remove these hazardous chemicals. However, monitoring these sites has been hindered by the expense and time delays inherent with current techniques capable of the necessary sensitivity and specificity. Gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC/MS), capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE), and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) are used to monitor environmental exposure and microbial activity, while biomass assays are used to monitor remediation processes. GC/MS, CZE, and HPLC all require expensive instrumentation, extensive operator expertise, and an off-site laboratory. Biomass assays are time consuming, and specificity for the microbe of interest is not guaranteed. Phase II will pursue a novel optical fiber sensor based on the revolutionary long-period grating (LPG), that can meet this need by detecting changes in refractive index resulting from target molecules binding to an affinity coating, thus enabling rapid quantitative detection. These optical fiber-based chemical and biological sensors have numerous advantages over current commercial environmental monitoring instrumentation, including lower cost, real-time measurement capability, portability for field applications, and high sensitivity and selectivity. These advantages will allow optical fiber sensor instrumentation to penetrate the multibillion-dollar environmental testing, pharmaceutical research, and industrial process monitoring fields.
