A Voltammetric Electronic Tongue Was Developed for Determination of Quality Parameters

A voltammetric electronic tongue has been developed for the determination of water quality parameters. The electronic tongue, which consists of simple noble and non-noble electrodes, shows relatively good predictive behaviour. The use of a voltammetric electronic tongue is proposed as a tool to predict concentration levels of certain water quality parameters from influent and effluent wastewater from a submerged anaerobic membrane bioreactor pilot plant, applied to domestic wastewater treatment. The electronic tongue consists of a set of noble (Au, Pt, Rh, Ir, Ag) and non-noble (Ni, Co, Cu) electrodes housed inside a stainless steel cylinder, which was used as the body of the electronic tongue system. As an initial step, an electrochemical study of the response of sulphate, orthophosphate, acetate, bicarbonate, and ammonium ions was carried out in water using the electrodes in the electronic tongue. The second part of the work was devoted to using the electronic tongue to characterise the influent and effluent waters from the wastewater treatment plant. Partial least-squares analysis was used to obtain a correlation between the data from the tongue and the pollution parameters measured in the laboratory. These include soluble chemical oxygen demand (CODs), soluble biological oxygen demand (BODs), ammonia (NH4–N), orthophosphate (PO4–P), sulphate (SO4–S), acetic acid (HAC), and alkalinity (Alk). A total of 28 and 11 samples were used in the training and validation steps, respectively, for both influent and effluent water samples. The electronic tongue showed relatively good predictive power for the determination of BOD, COD, NH4–N, PO4–P, SO4–S, and Alk. Source: workingwithwater.filtsep.com