Contamination of the water source and air pollution are two major problems that must be faced in the coming years. The increasing worldwide contamination of freshwater systems with thousands of industrial and natural chemical compounds is one of the key environmental problems facing humanity today. It is estimated that pathogens in water cause more than 2 million deaths annually. Additionally, traditional water quality assessment methods, such as liquid chromatography and mass spectroscopy, are expensive and time consuming from sample collection to analysis. Low cost tools are needed which can provide high sensitivity in sensing, while remaining portable and providing near real time analysis. Here, we present a low cost integrating cavity that can be used for highly sensitive environmental sensing.

Date Published: 12 March 2015
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 9314, Optics and Biophotonics in Low-Resource Settings, 93140T (12 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2079958

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9314:
Optics and Biophotonics in Low-Resource Settings
David Levitz; Aydogan Ozcan; David Erickson, Editor(s)