Bhubaneswar: Researchers at IIT-Bhubaneswar have developed a cost-effective and portable handheld device capable of rapidly and accurately detecting arsenic contamination in drinking water.
The devise 'ArsenSafe' has been developed by Nano Semic Pvt Ltd, a startup incubated at the Research and Entrepreneurship Park of IIT Bhubaneswar, under the guidance of faculty members Sayan Dey and Akshay K.
Dey and his research team at the Sensors and Spectroscopy Research Group of the School of Electrical and Computer Sciences (SECS), IIT Bhubaneswar, have been working on affordable, sensitive and field-deployable technologies to address arsenic contamination, a persistent concern in Odisha as well as India and other parts of the world, officials of the institute said.
"Designed for rapid, cost-effective and on-site testing, ArsenSafe enables accurate arsenic detection without requiring laboratory infrastructure or chemical reagents," they said.
The device uses a reduced graphene oxide (rGO)-based sensing platform and has been designed for simple operation with minimal setup and training. It can be deployed by government agencies, public health departments, environmental monitoring organisations, water treatment providers, industries, non-governmental organisations and individual consumers.
As per the researchers, the current prototype has achieved a high Technology Readiness Level (TRL) and has been successfully tested on water samples collected from the IIT Bhubaneswar campus and nearby areas.
In a related scientific achievement, the research team has recently published a study in Environmental Science: Nano, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The paper, authored by Dey, Arijit Pattra, Bathula Sathwik and Himanshu P Padole, describes an advanced micro-sensor based on reduced graphene oxide and its derivatives for detecting extremely low concentrations of arsenic in drinking water in line with WHO safety recommendations.
The Editorial Board of the journal has invited the article to be featured in its special themed collection on 'Nanosensing', recognising the significance of the work, officials said.