The use of tank experiments in assessing the performance of emerging tools in optimizing water monitoring

This paper describes the use of on-site tank experiments as a support system for assessing the performance of emerging tools in the context of river-water monitoring. As contaminants, we considered metals and organic compounds. We present the design and the methodology used for each experiment. We implemented the support system in Eijsden (NL) to assess the potential use of a screen-printed electrode/PalmSens device for monitoring metals. We found good agreement between the results obtained by PalmSens instrument and data from inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) for Cu, Cd and Pb. These results demonstrate the usefulness of tank experiments in evaluating the use of emerging tools under specific pollution scenarios and under real environmental conditions.