Nanomaterial enabled sensors for environmental contaminants

Abstract

The need and desire to understand the environment, especially the quality of one’s local water and air, has continued to expand with the emergence of the digital age. The bottleneck in understanding the environment has switched from being able to store all of the data collected to collecting enough data on a broad range of contaminants of environmental concern. Nanomaterial enabled sensors represent a suite of technologies developed over the last 15 years for the highly specific and sensitive detection of environmental contaminants. With the promise of facile, low cost, field-deployable technology, the ability to quantitatively understand nature in a systematic way will soon be a reality. In this review, we first introduce nanosensor design before exploring the application of nanosensors for the detection of three classes of environmental contaminants: pesticides, heavy metals, and pathogens.

An IoT Hardware Platform Architecture for Monitoring Power Grid Systems Based on Heterogeneous Multi-Sensors

“…A sensor device takes a particular stimulus from changes in the physical properties of the surroundings and produces responses to the fluctuations. Combined with the nanotechnology, which is a field of science that performs research to manipulate atoms and molecules in the nanometer scale, nanotechnology-enabled sensors facilitate the detection solution with enhanced sensitivity and improved accuracy [32]. Relying solely on data from one sensor may compromise the sensitivity due to environmental noises.…”

Application of DNA-Nanosensor for Environmental Monitoring: Recent Advances and Perspectives

“…Detection of other pesticides using nanosensor is discussed in detail elsewhere [ 22 , 69 ]. Sensor designing focuses on high sensitivity, low limit of detection, and good selectivity along with cost-effectiveness.…”

“…In the last few years, DNA components like ssDNA, dsDNA, mismatch DNA, CA rich, C rich, T rich, G-quadruplex, and aptamer have been used for the detection of pollutant. The commonly used nanomaterials include metallic, metal oxides, quantum dots (QDs), platinum (Pt), copper (Cu), magnetic, tungsten disulfide (WS2), mesoporous silica (MSN), graphdiyne, graphene, and graphene oxide [ 16 – 22 ]. Gold (Au) and silica NPs have been labeled as competitively safer nanomaterials for sensor application [ 11 •].…”

SNAPS: Sensor Analytics Point Solutions for Detection and Decision Support Systems

“…In biosensors, biomaterials are commonly employed to improve selectivity, bandwidth, or facilitate actuation [20,21,22]. Recent progress in engineering nanoscale materials has paved the way for development of non-biological chemical and physical sensors that accomplish some of these same improvements [23,24]. Whether the nature of the recognition event is chemical, biological, or physical, these molecular scale interactions are the initial step in sensing, and the material choice governs the efficacy of this RTA triad.…”