Highly efficient biocide silver-doped soda lime glass for application in water quality optical sensors

Abstract

In the last decade, biocidal materials have been extensively researched and applied as a coating for various touchscreen devices, in medicine and civil engineering. This research addresses important practical issues in application of surface- modified biocidal glass in water, and inspects optical properties in the spectral range between 350 nm and 500 nm, the range important for bacteria fluorescence detection. Testing of biocidal efficiency has been conducted in an environment rich with microorganisms and algae. To incorporate silver ions in soda lime glass plates, an ion-exchange process in a molten bath was used. The optical characterization of as-synthesized samples indicates very high transparency, above 90% at 440 nm, specifically important for escherichia coli detection. fter 140 days in the bioreactor, it was found that glass heated for 15 min at 350 0C produced best results, maintaining transparency above 85% in spectral range from 350 nm to 1000 nm.