Development of Sensing Platform based on Rare Earth Nanocomposite Films

Abstract

In the present era, contamination or pollution in water has become one of the global issues because of its serious health consequences and imbalance caused in the ecosystem. There is a continuous rise in the pollution or contamination caused by heavy metals in the atmosphere or in the aquatic ecosystem from the past few decades. Industrial waste plays a great role in polluting the water and is responsible for introducing different pollutants in the form of heavy metals in living beings. Heavy metals like arsenic, mercury, cadmium, cobalt, and many more are highly toxic for human beings. Determination of these heavy metals in the water, soil is a very challenging task. Though, these days a lot of research is going on for removing these heavy metals from the soil, water and atmosphere by adopting different and new methodologies, but those techniques are either expensive, time-consuming or are very complex to use. Current research evaluates the role of different chelating agents and types of substrates on the film evolution, thickness and its characteristics emission when the hydrothermal route is used as a synthesis technique. Moreover, the effect of temperature on the film thickness and surface roughness is also evaluated. Furthermore, a nearly transparent Upconverting (UC) thin-film has been grown entailing capability to ensue fluorescence resonance energy transfer and use it to detect Arsenic in drinking water. The objective of the current thesis is to enhance our understanding of UC film growth over the different glass substrates using the hydrothermal method. This understanding will enable us to use other bio-organic materials such as plant extract to synthesize UC films. Moreover, prepared UC film on glass substrate is proposed to use as a Arsenic sensor, as arsenic contamination in drinking water is very difficult to quantify analytically due to its low detection limit (5 ppb by World Health Organisation (WHO)).