(441i) Responsive Complex Emulsions: All-Liquid Sensors for Detection and Classification of Environmental Contaminants

Complex emulsions with responsive surfactants provide a unique sensing platform that leveraged tunable interactions at liquid-liquid interfaces. In this presentation, we report our progress toward the fabrication of distributed, real-time sensors by incorporating responsive complex emulsions with PDMS-based microfluidics. Specifically, we measure the dynamic interfacial behaviors of environmental contaminants (e.g., PFAS) in real-time and use these time-series data as chemical fingerprints to classify the identity and quantify the concentrations. We will discuss our effort toward applying a multiplexed platform for complex matrices of groundwater and mixtures of analytes. We anticipate that the incorporation of responsive all-liquid materials into sensing platforms will provide a cost-effective, easily tunable, and portable alternative to laboratory-based analytical methods for on-site sensing applications.