Chemical Collection, Refinement, and Adsorption Beacon

The ability to perform in-situ water quality measurements allows the turnaround time for evaluation to drop from days to minutes compared to off-site laboratory analysis. This reduces the total cost of the data collection effort and results are obtained immediately. Coupled with a low production cost, a multitude of these sensors can be deployed in order to provide an environmental snapshot. The Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) has developed a prototype device consisting of three components: a transducer made from carbon nanotubes (CNTs), a metric for determining the presence of copper in a deionized water (DI) solution, and a sensing platform that is powered using near field communication (NFC). This study utilizes L-histidine-modified CNTs in combination with an energy-harvesting sensing platform to relay data to a smart phone through NFC.