Integrated system for rapid enrichment and detection of airborne polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are extremely toxic environmental pollutants, which are harmful to the human body. Direct collection and analysis of airborne PAHs is essential for air quality monitoring. Herein, we dem-onstrated an integrated system for airborne PAHs enrichment and detection. The enrichment cube was composed of channels with threaded structures and curved channels, which had high capture efficiency. Then PAHs-carried parti-cles could be crushed into the detection chip for testing. The whole process took about 25 min (5 min for PAHs enrich-ment and 20 min for PAHs test). The limit of detection was 3.3 ng/m3, which could meet the needs of daily analysis. It had the advantages of low cost, low reagent consumption, simple operation, semi-automatic operation, high sensitiv-ity, high speed and high throughput compared with conventional techniques, showing the potential for becoming an air pollution monitoring platform.

Automated summary

This article introduces an integrated system for the enrichment and detection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the air. The system consists of channels with threaded structures and curved channels, which have high capture efficiency for PAHs. The PAHs-carried particles can be crushed into the detection chip for testing. The whole process takes about 25 minutes, with the advantages of low cost, low reagent consumption, simple operation, semi-automatic operation, high sensitivity, high speed, and high throughput, showing the potential to become an air pollution monitoring platform.