skip to main content


Title: Presumptive Contamination: A New Approach to PFAS Contamination Based on Likely Sources
Award ID(s):
1827817
NSF-PAR ID:
10373557
Author(s) / Creator(s):
 ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  ;  
Publisher / Repository:
American Chemical Society
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Environmental Science & Technology Letters
Volume:
9
Issue:
11
ISSN:
2328-8930
Page Range / eLocation ID:
p. 983-990
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract

    Illness as the result of ingesting bacterially contaminated foodstuffs represents a significant annual loss of human quality of life and economic impact globally. Significant research investment has recently been made in developing new materials that can be used to construct food contacting tools and surfaces that might minimize the risk of cross‐contamination of bacteria from one food item to another. This is done to mitigate the spread of bacterial contamination and resultant foodborne illness. Internet‐based literature search tools such as Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Scopus were utilized to investigate publishing trends within the last 10 years related to the development of antimicrobial and antifouling surfaces with potential use in food processing applications. Technologies investigated were categorized into four major groups: antimicrobial agent–releasing coatings, contact‐based antimicrobial coatings, superhydrophobic antifouling coatings, and repulsion‐based antifouling coatings. The advantages for each group and technical challenges remaining before wide‐scale implementation were compared. A diverse array of emerging antimicrobial and antifouling technologies were identified, designed to suit a wide range of food contact applications. Although each poses distinct and promising advantages, significant further research investment will likely be required to reliably produce effective materials economically and safely enough to equip large‐scale operations such as farms, food processing facilities, and kitchens.

     
    more » « less
  2. Abstract

    Prior investigations have attempted to characterize the longitudinal variability of the column number density ratio of atomic oxygen to molecular nitrogen (O/N2) in the context of non‐migrating tides. The retrieval of thermosphericO/N2from far ultra‐violet (FUV) emissions assumes production is due to photoelectron impact excitation on O and N2. Consequently, efforts to characterize the tidal variability inO/N2have been limited by ionospheric contamination from O+ + e radiative recombination at afternoon local times (LT) around the equatorial ionization anomaly. The retrieval ofO/N2from FUV observations by the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) provides an opportunity to address this limitation. In this work, we derive modifiedO/N2datasets to delineate the response of thermospheric composition to non‐migrating tides as a function of LT in the absence of ionospheric contamination. We assess estimates of the ionospheric contribution to 135.6 nm emission intensities based on either Global Ionospheric Specification (GIS) electron density, International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) model output, or observations from the Extreme Ultra‐Violet imager (EUV) onboard ICON during March and September equinox conditions in 2020. Our approach accounts for any biases between the ionospheric and airglow datasets. We found that the ICON‐FUV data set, corrected for ionospheric contamination based on GIS, uncovered a previously obscured diurnal eastward wavenumber 2 tide in a longitudinal wavenumber 3 pattern at March equinox in 2020. This finding demonstrates not only the necessity of correcting for ionospheric contamination of the FUV signals but also the utility of using GIS for the correction.

     
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)