E-tongue Sensor Array For Shipyard Water Monitoring Navy SBIR FY2006.2 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2006.2 Topic No.: N06-133 Topic Title: E-tongue Sensor Array For Shipyard Water Monitoring Proposal No.: N062-133-0900 Firm: Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc. 44 Hunt Street Watertown, Massachusetts 02472-4699 Contact: Senerath Palamakumbura Phone: (617) 668-6801 Web Site: http://www.rmdinc.com Abstract: Navy program office is seeking capability to monitor known pollutants in shipyard waste water discharges to comply with local environmental discharge limits. The pollutants of concern are heavy metal ions but petroleum hydrocarbons and semi volatile organics are also of interest. The monitoring system should be lightweight (hand held), low power, reliable, low maintenance, affordable, and very responsive. The sensor must detect, identify, quantify heavy metals and should be able to be operated by field personal. Ability to configure in wireless mode to alert monitors is also desirable. RMD in collaboration with Prof. Barry Lavine of Oklahoma State University proposes a chemiresister sensor array (e-tongue) to address this need. The analyte signatures from the cross-reactive array will be characterized by a trained pattern recognition algorithm, developed and trained by Prof. Lavine. The discrimination and orthogonality of the sensor elements in the array will be optimized by choosing different film compositions as well as ionophores for respective metal ions. Commercial ionophores as well as specialized ionophores, being developed by Prof. Lavine, will be employed. The sensor components are low cost and hand held. It can also be configured for continuous monitoring with remote communication capability. Benefits: The proposed array with conductivity transduction is simple to make and is extremely low cost. This latter aspect allows widespread use by many military and civilian customer like water and food contamination, industrial water discharge monitoring and environmental monitoring. Currently, ion spectroscopy is used for metal ion monitoring, which requires expensive instruments and trained technicians. Return