Optofluidic devices are of high interest for online monitoring and analyzing biochemical targets in water by integrating the complex on-chip pretreatment of target analytes and spectral analysis. Compared with the traditional bulk equipment, versatile optical detection and biochemical analysis are more easily integrated on an optofluidic chip, which promotes the development of on-chip real-time rapid detection and monitoring. Here, we report an optofluidic platform for online monitoring total phosphorous in water by absorption spectrometry, which naturally combines the merits of both the photo-Fenton effect and microfluidics to realize the rapid on-chip digestion of phosphate at room temperature and normal pressure. The functional cells for chromogenic reaction and optical absorption detection are respectively fabricated on the platform to analyze the content of total phosphorus in surface water. In the experiment, the on-chip digestion time of phosphate is dramatically declined to 8.6 seconds and thus the detection time is greatly shortened to a few minutes. The detection range of total phosphorus is demonstrated as 0.005–1.00 mg/L, which satisfies the detection requirements of most environmental water samples. Its availability for measuring the total phosphorous in real water samples is also verified. Predictably, this platform is adapted to on-chip analyze many other biochemical targets in water.
The realization of high-efficient digestion in a microfluidic reactor is considered to be advantageous for pretreatment toward online pollutant detection. However, it is difficult to achieve satisfactory device performance due to the gap between the low digestion reaction efficiency and the demand for rapid pretreatment for online detection. Herein, we design and manufacture an optofluidic microreactor combined with a MnO 2 nanofilm localizing the heat inside the reaction chamber under solar irradiation, which contributes a lot to the on-chip nutrient digestion efficiency enhancement. The overall temperature of the water sample in the reactor chamber can be dramatically increased in a fleeting time of less than 1 s and maintained at 78 °C. The digestion rate constant of the microreactor is improved by about 100 times compared with that obtained by the traditional method in the national standard, which is attributed to temperature enhancement and various oxidation reactions in the heated reaction chamber. Notably, when pretreating the actual total phosphorus water samples, the digestion efficiency is demonstrated to be higher than 95% within 12 s under solar light irradiation. The optofluidic platform brings many benefits to accelerate the various photochemically enhanced reactions using solar light and is extremely adapted for rapid pretreatment of biochemical samples to further develop their online analysis.
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