Publikation
Microfluidic approach for controlled ultraviolet treatment of colored and fluorescent dissolved organic matter
Raque Lopes; Mario Luis Miranda; Helmut Schütte; Stefan Gassmann; Oliver Zielinski
In: Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy (SAA), Vol. 239 (2020), No. 118435, Pages 1-10, Elsevier B.V. Amsterdam, 5/2020.
Zusammenfassung
Using microfluidic systems to address the optical properties of Colored and Fluorescent Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM/FDOM) offers new ways for researching its interactionswith the environment, and its response to rapid, aswell as extreme, changes of abiotic conditions. Here we present a microfluidic device with an Ultraviolet (UV) component. The manufactured microfluidic device consists of passing a dissolved organic matter sample through a microchannel applying a combination of treatments using different UV wavelengths and exposure times. Here we test theworkability of the microdevice by analyzing the effect of UV light on CDOM and FDOM, using as irradiations UVA and UVB to incite photodegradation, over different times. We then compare the absorbance and fluorescence, measured from both treated and non-treated samples. The analysis of the measurements is done by the calculation of the slope ratio, as indicative of molecular weight and dissolved organic carbon, besides the fluorescence humification index (HIX) as an overview of the difference between treated and non-treated of the excitation-emission matrices (EEMs). Our results showthe efficiency of the microdevice by demonstrating a direct relation of degradation degree with exposure time. FDOM exposure to UVB shows a possible relation to humic-like fluorophores intensity, shown in HIX and the overviewdifference. Furthermore, the changes showed in the slope ratio demonstrate photodegradation in all treatments, with UVB exhibiting an increased influence.The combination of microfluidic sample treatment within in situ applications of optical sensors will enhance our capacities in addressing biogeochemical processes in the marine environment, which were not accessible with conventional bulk methods.