This dynamic effort keeps me excited about teaching, and I feel this excitement inspires the students as well. My research with undergraduate students involves the design of chemical sensors to measure air pollutant concentrations in the lower atmosphere. Understanding the transport and degradation of air pollutants requires accurate, routine monitoring of their concentration. Continuous monitoring is prohibitively expensive with current technology. Thus, new and inexpensive strategies are needed for measuring air pollutant concentrations.
Chemical sensors are an obvious choice.
SPR uses a laser to monitor the thickness of material on the surface of a piece of gold. Then, the coated gold surface is exposed to air, and the desired pollutant sticks to the surface. SPR measures the thickness of the pollutant layer, which is related to its concentration in the air. This amazing and inexpensive technique has been developed by others, and so the major hurdle left in developing chemical sensors is the chemical coatings that are sticky toward certain air pollutants but not other compounds in the air. A promising type of coating, which we are just starting to investigate, is a thin film of various zeolites.