Old work on environmental protection
 

The MUVS sensor

In the early 1990s I worked on a variety of sensor systems, including ones for environmental sensing.

The focus of the work was detection of toxins in water. Bacterial metabolism can be monitored in real time, non-invasively, by monitoring the absorbance spectrum of the bugs in the near- to mid-UV region. I developed methods and algorithsm to use this to detect general pollutants and toxins in water, by adding them to a range of bacterial species and monitoring their UV absorbance spectrum between 190nm and 350nm. The process was called MUVS.

Here is a chart of a result of the sensor tested on a
  • Low (minimal detectable by this method)
  • Medium (lowest detectable by the 'trout monitor' standard
  • High (maximum permissable under UK regulations at the time)
levels of two common pollutants - Zinc and phenol - spiked into distilled water and three actual water samples from the East Anglia region.

The vertical axis is the level of significance in 10 runs between control water and the toxin sample.

This work was generously sponsored by Anglian Water.

Other work was in detecting antibiotics in milk, and some specific environmental chemicals using fluorescent immunoassay.

I published several technical papers on this - as this was before papers were made available even for subscription over the Internet, I would be happy to provide copies if someone seriously wants to take the MUVS work forward.