A Portable Microfluidic Platform With Integrated Magnetic Mesoporous Carbon Absorbent and Chemiresistive Gas Sensor for Pollutant Detection in Water

Abstract

In the era of industrialization, water pollution has become a severe environmental and health challenge for humanity, and the risk management for clean water requires in situ monitoring of contaminants, and therefore a portable, highly sensitive, real‐time monitoring device is highly desired. Here, we introduce a portable microfluidic platform (PMP) with a magnetic separation/enrichment module and a detector of Zn‐doped SnO 2 gas sensor which can be applied to the pollutant (e.g., toluene, quinolone antibiotics, diethyl phthalate) detection in aqueous samples. By using the excellent enrichment‐desorption of magnetic absorbent for pollutants, the PMP can achieve the limit detection of 80 ppb towards toluene and the whole sample analysis can be accomplished in about 30 min. By integrating the test curves of standard samples with different concentrations of toluene, a quantitative relationship between concentration and peak area can be obtained, and the coefficient of determination ( R 2 ) is about 0.977 which is almost the same as that detected by gas chromatography. The detection results can be transmitted to an intelligent terminal wirelessly through the highly integrated microsystem, and therefore the PMP holds a great promise for practical application.