Event
Beginning: 06/24/20
Location: Online
Wednesday, June 24th at 2:00 PM (EDT)
Global drinking water sources remain prone to carcinogenic petroleum product contaminations due to lack of detection capacity at or before treatment plant intake. Optical detection of these compounds is challenging due to high background signals from natural and or man-made components. Further, while target contaminants may be regulated at low μg/L levels, conventional optical techniques are generally limited to mg/L detection ranges.
This presentation reports on patented A-TEEM spectroscopy which primarily uses fluorescence excitation emission matrix data that are corrected for inner-filter effects (IFE) to eliminate spectral distortion. We evaluated Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene and Xylene (BTEX) as well as phenol and naphthalene, as they represent typical water soluble fractions (WSF) of petroleum products, in filtered (0.45 μM) raw surface water. We report that classification and regression using methods including Support Vector Machine or XGradient Boost algorithms can be effectively validated to rapidly yield low μg/L detection limits with potential for automated early-warning reporting.