Development of passive samplers and electroanalytical techniques to evaluate the speciation and availability of nutrients and inorganic contaminants in water (AvMuest)

An efficient management of water resources must ensure water amount and quality adequate for each use. The aim of the project is the development and optimisation of new monitoring techniques that can be useful for water quality control. These techniques will respond to the increasing requirements of environmental quality allowing, at the same time, an adequate understanding of the concepts of chemical speciation and availability of inorganic pollutants and/or nutrients. These concepts determine the properties, distribution and circulation of these elements in the environment. The specific objectives are: 1) Development of DGT (Diffusive Gradients in Thin Films), improving its interpretation and modelling, trying new binding phases, determining key parameters and exploiting information from regimes other than stead state. 2) Development of devices based on functionalized membranes, optimizing the membrane phase to ensure an adequate stability that will allow to include them in novel systems of passive sampling and progressing in their modelling. 3) Development of AGNES (Absence of Gradients and Nernstian Equilibrium Stripping), to gain access, in very competitive times, to concentrations of well-defined species (not yet tackled) and to information on the lability of the complexes (when combined with other electroanalytical techniques). 5) Study of selected continental waters and harmonization of the information extracted by means of the different techniques within an integrated interpretative framework. 6) Study of speciation in aqueous media spiked with a type of emerging pollutant such as engineered nanomaterials, and assessment of the availability of the species released from them due to dissolution.