Use of a Bioelectronic Tongue for the Monitoring of the Photodegradation of Phenolic Compounds

The application of a voltammetric bioelectronic tongue for the simultaneous monitoring of catechol, m-cresol and guaiacol in wastewater is reported. Voltammetric responses obtained from an array of bulk modified (bio)sensors, containing enzymes such as tyrosinase and laccase, were combined with chemometric tools such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) for building the quantitative prediction model. To this end, the chemometric model was first built employing a factorial design, validated employing an external test set of samples (n=14; total NRMSE of 0.076), and afterwards applied to the monitoring of the mineralization of the three phenol pollutants during a photo-Fenton advanced oxidation process.