Contamination Sensors

Because of the flexibility of the NevadaNano platform, a system constructed with our modules could also provide air quality monitoring for pollutants, toxic industrial chemicals, and chemical and biological agents with the same network of sensors. For example, the high sensitivity of the sensor platform allows it to be used in air quality monitoring applications. These applications range from monitoring urban air quality for health and safety applications to monitoring air quality near factories and industrial complexes to ensure the effectiveness of factory exhaust scrubbing systems, to test compliance with governmental regulations, and to monitor indoor and outdoor air quality for ensuring safe environments for employees and residents. Specific examples of this include direct measuring of mercury, formaldehyde, allyl alcohol, toluene diisocyanate (2,4), ammonium hydroxide and other toxic chemicals. Overall, the unique ability of a single SSA sensor configuration to target a broad spectrum of analytes specific to industrial processing – including hazardous effluents, trace metals, and organic compounds – is a primary advantage of our platform.

In 2007, NevadaNano successfully completed an SBIR program for the U.S. Department of Energy focused on Mercury contamination detection. Contamination of soil and water in the U.S. is a big problem, and one of the most prevalent contaminants is Mercury. Current mercury sensors for air and soil testing are large, table-top instruments that can be used in the field but are generally best used in a laboratory setting. Systems for this application typically cost about $100,000 and operation requires a highly skilled scientist.

States and municipalities currently rely on an extremely sparse distribution of monitoring stations due to the high cost of air quality measuring stations. In our state, Nevada, about 100 tons of mercury has been discharged into the environment by the mining industry over the last 25 years, prompting first-of-a-kind regulations for airborne mercury emissions at precious metal mines in March of 2006. But, having only a few measurement stations provides a limited picture of the real air quality, as “hot spots” may exist in the region that cannot be adequately monitored with such a sparse network of sensors. Low-cost sensors that provide a real-time, in-situ measurement of mercury contamination and changes in mercury concentrations as conditions change (e.g. during remediation) would be a major benefit to both government and citizenry. The technology developed by NNTS has the potential to provide small, low-cost, low-power sensors for all of these applications.

Industrial monitoring is one key example of the need for mercury sensors. This application requires reliable, low-cost sensing technology to ensure industrial compliance with regulations, improve the usage of limited resources, and monitor air quality. For example, the State of Michigan has a chemical monitoring trailer with which it can monitor emissions from factories and other sites. Due to the high cost of this trailer, only one is available it is shared with the State of Wisconsin. Since there is only one trailer, it can only be located at one site near the factory. When the wind is blowing from the factory towards the trailer, useful data is obtainable; yet when the wind is in any other direction, the acquired data is essentially useless. Sensor solutions from NevadaNano for detecting mercury and other contaminants will mitigate these problems. Due to the inherent low cost of a sensor system constructed using our sensor modules, multiple systems can be established at all compass points around a factory or mine, thereby providing the staff or the government agency with accurate data of the emissions of multiple target chemicals, independent of the current wind direction.