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Detection of illicit drug residues from wastewater provides a new route toward community-level assessment of drug abuse that is critical to public health. However, traditional chemistry analytical tools such as high-performance liquid chromatography in tandem with mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS) cannot meet the large-scale testing requirement in terms of cost, promptness, and convenience of use. In this article, we demonstrated ultra-sensitive and portable surface-enhanced Raman scattering sensing (SERS) of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, from sewage water and achieved quantitative analysis through principal component analysis and partial least-squares regression. The SERS substrates adopted in this application were synthesized by in situ growth of silver nanoparticles on diatomaceous earth films, which show ultra-high sensitivity down to 10 parts per trillion in artificially contaminated tap water in the lab using a commercial portable Raman spectrometer. Based on training data from artificially contaminated tap water, we predicted the fentanyl concentration in the sewage water from a wastewater treatment plant to be 0.8 parts per billion (ppb). As a comparison, the HPLC-MS confirmed the fentanyl concentration was below 1 ppb but failed to provide a specific value of the concentration since the concentration was too low. In addition, we further proved the validity of our SERS sensing technique by comparing SERS results from multiple sewage water treatment plants, and the results are consistent with the public health data from our local health authority. Such SERS sensing technique with ultra-high sensitivity down to sub-ppb level proved its feasibility for point-of-care detection of illicit drugs from sewage water, which is crucial to assess public health.
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A Dual-Mode Microwave Resonator for Liquid Chromatography Applications
This work presents a microwave microfluidic sensor for high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) applications. The sensor is based on a modified square ring loaded resonator (SRLR), where a transmission line and a ring are electrically shorted with a center gap. A microfluidic channel is bonded above the gap for liquid-under-test (LUT) measurement. When the dielectric constant of LUT is above a threshold value, two degeneration modes of the resonator are separated, resulting in two transmission-zero frequencies. The threshold dielectric constant can be easily tuned by the gap size. High sensitivity is achieved when LUT dielectric constant is close to the threshold value. These features enable the proposed resonator to be optimized for different microfluidic applications. To validate the design, three resonators with 10 µm, 30 µm and 90 µm gap sizes are built and tested with water-methanol solutions in various volume fractions. Additionally, the sensor is connected in series with HPLC system for caffeine and sucrose detection. The detection linearity is characterized by measuring water-caffeine samples from 0.77 ppm to 1000 ppm. A 0.231 ppm limit of detection (LOD) is achieved, revealing a comparable sensitivity with commercial ultraviolet (UV) detectors. The compatibility of the proposed sensor to gradient elution is also demonstrated.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1711463
- PAR ID:
- 10250836
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE sensors journal
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1558-1748
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1222-1228
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
