Monitoring heavy-metal loads
By Nina E. Tveter
Photos: Rune Petter Ness
Chemists at NTNU have discovered a more environmentally friendly way of checking heavy-metal loads in drinking water and industrial waste.
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Dentistry amalgam can be used instead of mercury, which is an environmental pollutant, to construct the electrodes used in heavy-metal analysis. |
Fundamental research at the Department of Chemistry is creating new and more cost-effective ways of monitoring heavy-metal loads. Professor Knut Schrøder and research student Øyvind Mikkelsen have discovered that dentistry amalgam can be used instead of mercury, which is an environmental pollutant, to construct the electrodes used in heavy-metal analysis. Mercury is suitable for laboratory work, but in the field it may cause pollution. The new electrode material will make more comprehensive and frequent environmental checks possible for applications such as drinking water and industrial waste.
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Oceanor is involved in the testing
of prototype analytic equipment in the River Nidelva in Trondheim.
Venthan Sanmuganathan, development eng. (left) and |
NTNU is working in collaboration with Oceanor, a small company in Trondheim in the commercial development. Oceanor has constructed prototypes of analytic equipment that can make use of the new electrode material in online heavy metal detection. The advantage with such an online system is that the heavy metal content of, for instance, a river, can be read off - via the Internet - as often as one wishes. Without such a system researchers would have to take water samples to a laboratory for analysis. Such traditional methods are time-consuming and costly, and in addition samples can easily be contaminated and can produce inaccurate results.
Oceanor is now involved in the testing of prototype analytic equipment in the River Nidelva in Trondheim. Once the system is up and running, the heavy metal test results will be available daily through the Internet. This new online technology will also soon be used in an attempt to monitor the quality of the drinking water in the natural sciences building at NTNU - before the apparatus is released for general use in the field.
Mikkelsen and Schrøder have also obtained extremely good results from an electrode consisting of silver plus a small amount of added bismuth. The two researchers have a patent pending for these new materials for electrodes.
* Contact at NTNU: Øyvind Mikkelsen
Tel: + 47 73 59 62 60
E-mail: Oyvind.Mikkelsen@chembio.ntnu.no