Vortex microflow inducer that enables detection of ultra-low concentrations of species in sensors

Introduction

According to WHO, in 2018, more than 100,000 chemicals were released into the global environment due to their production, use, and disposal. In this regard, water is the key element for their effective transport in the food chain. Since remediation can be extremely difficult, such pollution is leading to acute or chronic toxicity in aquatic organisms, loss of habitats and biodiversity, as well as human diseases.

Challenges in Wastewater Management

Industrial wastewater flows contain hazardous and toxic species that are not easy to process. Treatment installations need extremely reliable and sensitive sensing solutions to continuously monitor the efficiency of the side stream treatment processes.

At the same time, the world population is increasingly depending on aquaculture for nutritious food. Frequent analysis of water quality is essential and needs to be performed at the point-of-testing, not in remote laboratories.

Common Issues

The common challenges in environmental control, wastewater management, and aquaculture include:

1. Detection of species present in very low concentrations in small sample sizes.
2. The need for a technique that can be performed at point-of-testing.
3. Low cost and minimal time required for analysis.

Technological Advances

In the last decade, new sensor technologies have emerged that can meet these challenges. However, these sensors require the sample to flow over the sensor surface, and importantly, detection is only possible if the target species in flow makes contact with the sensor surface. This is one of the key technological hurdles that today’s microfluidics sensors have not overcome yet.

VORTEX SENSOR Project

In the VORTEX SENSOR project, vortices will be induced in the flow channel with acoustic streaming, an approach which was developed in ERC Starting Grant EVODIS. This will enable long-range transport of compounds towards the sensor surface.

In VORTEX SENSOR, a prototype of the very first biosensor with vortex microflow inducer will be built, and its performance will be validated with two relevant pathogens for aquaculture of salmon.