Supply of a multi-channelled poly-potentiostat for a low-cost electrochemical sensor

One of the greatest challenges in drink water safety is the increasing public concern with the contamination of carcinogenic disinfection by products (DBP), since chemical disinfection (e.g., chlorination) is widely adopted and referred to as the single process able to prevent water-borne disease (or pathogenic) outbreaks. For water utility companies, typical process to analyse these DBPs takes three days, which requires the transportation of water samples to a lab and is also expensive (e.g. £200 per sample) and labour intensive. Therefore, quick turnaround time from sampling to analytical result is a unmet imperative where contamination of water supplies is suspected.The investment on the multi-channelled poly-potentiostat, which will be based on Bay Campus, is the core to deliver this project and will be also made available to all Department members and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences it belongs to. This will allow us to maintain our world-class research output, indispensable to support enhance the skills base within Wales and strengthen collaborations with our numerous industry partners to deliver on government national and international strategic priorities.The key objective of this project is to design, fabricate and validate electrochemical biosensor platform based on low-cost carbon transducers for the rapid, sensitive, and reliable detection of carcinogenic DBPs in water. Developed sensor arrays in this project will reduce the existing analysis time of UK water companies for DBP contamination from three days to three minutes in situ, so that water treatment processes (both drinking water and wastewater discharge to the environment) can be controlled and optimized in real time. The resulting knowledge, evidence and innovation will impact current urban water infrastructures and management in Wales and UK by reducing the risk of water quality failure, their environmental footprint, and the likelihood of excessive future investment on the infrastructures of water quality management.In general, there are a couple of ways of performing multiple potentiostat measurements in parallel in a single instrument. Particularly, we require a multi-channelled potentiostat to have the versatility of using multiple working electrodes (i.e. up to 10) in the same cell sharing a counter and a reference electrode, while all working electrodes perform the same method at the same time. This makes our requirement essentially a multi-channelled (10) poly-potentiostat. To increase measurement efficiency, this instrument package should also provide a hand-held unit to validate sensing result in the field. And preferably, they should be sharing the same hardware system so it would be ideal to reproducing the results between the benchtop and portable unit.By enabling the synchronization of the channels and adjusting the setup of connection cables, we should be able to use multiple working electrodes, one counter and one reference electrode in the same cell performing the electrochemical measurement for each of working electrode at the same time.