Santra D, Mandal S, Santra A, Ghorai UK. Cost effective and wireless portable device for estimation of hexavalent Chromium, Fluoride and Iron in drinking water. Anal Chem. 2018 Oct 3. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.8b03337.
The quality of drinking water often remains unknown to the people because of the inadequacy of cost-effective testing systems that can be used in field. Major portable instruments for water quality analysis include Ion Selective Electrodes (ISE) or Colorimeters. These are low cost devices but in case of multiple analyte detection like hexavalent Cr, Fluoride (F-) and Iron (Fe) with single instrumentation, no portable systems are available till date as per the authors’ knowledge. In this paper, we demonstrate the working of a low cost (approximate price INR 1500 or US $ 20) portable colorimetric system that can be operated with android smartphones wirelessly to estimate the contamination levels of Cr(VI), F-, or Fe in drinking water. This system also generates absorption spectra by recording absorbance of the analyte using Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) sensor. An android application software named “Spectruino” is developed to calculate the concentration of the analytes. We strongly believe that this cost-effective portable system will be very useful to ensure the drinking water quality throughout the continent to improve human health.
