Project: OPTIcal Monitoring In Situ of Metals

Acronym	OPTIMO (Reference Number: PS-2016_24)
Project Topic	Waters pollution with metals such as As, Be, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, or Pb is an increasing ecological and global public health concern. Off-line laboratory analysis is not effective in the detection of acute contamination. Environmental authorities, the agricultural sector, and manufacturing industries lack affordable tools for monitoring trace metals in water. The need and opportunity arise for applying recent scientific and technological breakthroughs to the development and demonstration of prototype instruments capable of monitoring a wide range of metals in water at their environmental concentration levels in real time. The consortium of two R&D centres and two SMEs will design, produce, evaluate and demonstrate, both in the laboratory and in the field, reliable and affordable procedures for the real-time detection of trace metals in water and soil by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). New strategies for metals preconcentration in polluted water samples based on solid-phase extraction will be developed, to improve the portable LIBS technology for a full characterization of polluted sites, both for liquid and solid samples. Recent scientific and technological breakthroughs in optical spectroscopy suggest LIBS technology as potentially suitable for sub-ppm metal quantitation. In this proposal, a new approach is presented for solving one of the most complex and difficult steps in LIBS environmental analysis. A reliable procedure for the quantification of metals in liquid samples will be developed and demonstrated both in laboratory and in field. A low cost dual‐pulse laser technology optimized for LIBS application will be designed, integrating a laser module with an echelle spectrometer coupled to an ICCD detector and exploiting recent technological advances.
Network	PhotonicSensing
Call	Photonics based sensing

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	National Research Council	Coordinator	Italy
2	Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology	Partner	Germany
3	Lucas Instruments GmbH	Partner	Germany
4	Advanced Fibre Tools GmbH	Partner	Germany
5	Cecchi srl	Partner	Italy
6	University of Florence	Partner	Italy