Micro Reduction Column

Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for all aquatic plants and animals for the formation of amino acids. However, its excessive concentration in water leads to eutrophication that results in degradation of quality of water. Therefore it is of high importance to have a reliable and sensitive method to measure concentration of dissolved nitrogen, in form of ammonia (NH₃), nitrate (NO₃^-) and nitrite (NO₂) in water sample. However, it is very difficult to directly measure concentration of nitrite. A common procedure for quantitative analysis of nitrate (NO₃^-)  is to reduce it to nitrite (NO₂) inside reduction column, add N-(1-Naphthyl)ethylenediamine marker, and perform photospectrometric analysis of the reaction product.

The reduction column is the key component of the system to measure the concentration of nitrogen in drinking water. Typically, the column are packed with copper, cadmium or lead catalyst, that have a high reduction ability, but are also toxic. Our efforts concentrate on the development of the environmental-friendly column  based on zinc for reduction of nitrate. Our goal is to improve the reduction efficiency for nitrate ions. Last, but not least, we also focus on the reduction of fabrication costs by using 3D printing technology.

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