Invited Speakers
Dr. Yuankai Huang
Assistant Professor, Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½
Applications of Nanotechnology in Environmental Sensors
Continuous monitoring of nutrients, metals, and emerging contaminants is increasingly important for protecting water quality, optimizing treatment processes, and enabling data-driven environmental management. However, conventional laboratory analyses are often costly, time-consuming, and unable to capture rapid changes in complex environmental systems. Nanotechnology provides new opportunities to develop compact, sensitive, and field-deployable sensors for real-time monitoring. This presentation will highlight our research on nanomaterial-enabled electrochemical sensors, with an emphasis on solid-contact ion-selective electrodes for monitoring environmentally relevant ions. Nanostructured materials, functional polymers, and antifouling interfaces are incorporated into sensor architectures to improve signal stability, ion transport, selectivity, and resistance to biofouling.
Machine learning is further integrated with sensor development to identify relationships among molecular properties, material characteristics, fabrication conditions, and sensor performance. Interpretable models can reveal the factors governing sensitivity, selectivity, detection limits, and long-term stability, thereby guiding material selection and reducing experimental trial and error. These concepts are also being extended to microplastic monitoring in drinking water systems. Our emerging approach combines acoustofluidic enrichment and size- or density-based separation with nanomaterial-engineered electrochemical interfaces. Voltammetric and impedance responses generated by interactions between plastic particles and sensor surfaces are interpreted using physics-informed machine learning to estimate microplastic mass concentration while accounting for particle properties, water chemistry, recovery efficiency, and prediction uncertainty. Together, these efforts demonstrate how nanomaterials, electrochemical sensing, and data-driven design can support intelligent environmental monitoring.