Technology towards a lab-on-a-chip GC for environmental research.

A major analytical science success of the 20th Century has been the development of technology to detect trace level chemicals in highly complex mixtures and at the parts per trillion level and below. Technology development in this area has been primarily focussed on issues of sensitivity and specificity often at the expense of unit cost, size or operational ease. A major challenge for the 21st Century is to develop miniaturised separation, detection and sensor technologies and harness them together to form highly specific measurement techniques in forms that are low cost, fully autonomous and yet which have all the capabilities of today's laboratory based instruments. By reducing size and power allows instruments to be used in the field and in locations where mains electricity may not necessarily be available. This project is concerned with developing fundamental technology needed to produce a low power but high sensitivity gas chromatograph (GC). GC is a major analytical method and is used throughout environmental science to detect and identify chemicals in air, water and soils. The size and power consumption of current commercially available instruments is such that they are used almost exclusively in the laboratory and are not field portable. The core technologies to be developed in this project are micro fabricated gas chromatography devices wet-etched at the micron level onto alkali metal oxide glass monoliths. This is a so-called lab-on-a-chip technology. This is a very new engineering possibility and is one which is now being activity exploited for biochemical and pharmaceutical applications through the explosion of interest in lab-on-a-chip microfluidics. The technology has yet to be applied to gaseous matrices and this project therefore sits as state of the art with respect to microfluidic research and development. Through the use of a planar lab-on-a-chip, a target is to reduce energy consumption from current values of the order ~5 x 107 J, to around 500 J. / Effectively to move from a 2-3kW device requiring mains electricity to a device using peak powers of the order 50-100W. At these energy levels device operation from solar / wind charging becomes feasible and disconnection from mains electricity, a holy grail for very remote monitoring, becomes possible.