Real-Time On-Site Multielement Analysis of Environmental Waters with a Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) System

Strict regulations are in place to control the effluents of mining sites and other industries. Heavy metal contamination of aquatic systems caused by leakages is difficult to mitigate as it takes time to detect and localize the leak. Dynamic sampling would drastically reduce the time to locate leakages and allow faster actions to reduce the impact on the environment. The present study introduces a novel portable multielement water analysis system to simultaneously measure Mn, Ni, Cu, Zn, Pb, and U in water samples from natural sources within 15 min from the sampling. The metals are preconcentrated from a 10 mL water sample into a nanoporous filter based on bisphosphonate-modified thermally carbonized porous silicon. The metals can be conveniently analyzed from the filter with a portable XRF analyzer in field conditions. The system was empirically calibrated for a lake water matrix with neutral pH and low alkaline metal concentration. A strong correlation between the XRF intensities and the ICP-MS results was obtained in a concentration range from 50 to 10 000 μg/L. With a DPO-2000C XRF analyzer, the detection limits were 103, 86, 92, 35, 44, and 43 μg/L for Mn, Ni, Cu, Zn, Pb, and U, respectively. The corresponding values with X-MET8000 Expert Geo were 137, 46, 62, 38, 29, and 54. The system was successfully validated with simulated multielement lake water samples and piloted in field conditions. The system provides an efficient way to monitor metals in environmental waters in cases where quick on-site results are needed.