Axiom Analytical has published technical note AN-924, entitled 'Continuous Monitoring of Volatile Organic Compounds in Industrial Waste Water'.
This paper describes a system that provides rapid and fully automatic monitoring of selected volatile organics in water.
Many priority pollutants, such as chlorinated hydrocarbons and aromatics, are characterised by low solubility and high vapour pressures.
For such substances, the system can provide simultaneous measurements of multiple species with detection limits in the low ppb range and updates every few minutes.
The discharge of organic chemicals into wastewater is an endemic problem in chemical processing.
As a result, most plants employ remediation facilities to purify their wastewater before discharging it into the environment.
However, these facilities can be easily overloaded by a large spill.
Conventional detection methods, which involve the periodic collection of samples and laboratory analysis by relatively slow techniques such as GC or GC/MS, suffer from a number of limitations, not least of which is the inability to detect a major spill before it can reach - and possibly damage - the remediation facility.
The system described in the new technical note obviates these problems by using the sparging infrared technique to provide an automated system for the continuous monitoring of volatile organic pollutants.
The system uses a stream of air bubbles to transfer the pollutants from a fixed volume of water to an air stream, where infrared spectroscopy can be used to quickly and easily measure the concentrations.
