Acetone in water sensor

[MPelletier]

Hi,

I'm looking to monitor a possible presence of acetone in water .
The purpose is to send the water to a waste reservoir to send to a specialist if a quantity of acetone has been mixed up with the water.

Have you heard about an inline sensor that detects acetone in water?

Thank you

 

[mbt22]

An NIR cell or online GC should both work.

Matt

 

[RaRo]

Density would work quite well.
Refraction index could be used too.
GC is probably too costly for the application.

 

[mbt22]

Is it a pure acetone/water stream, or are there other components present?

Matt

 

[MPelletier]

It is not only pure water/acetone. The water is the one from the sanitary drainage and if a quantity of acetone is spilled in the room, I want to send it to the water treatment. It may content cleaning product used to clean the room (walls, floor and equipment).

Although acetone is not often widespread, I don't want to send all sanitary water to treatment if I can ($$$$).

Thank you.

 

[moltenmetal]

I'm fairly confident that what you're looking for doesn't exist. The best you're going to get is an expensive device which gives you a whole lot of false positives, or worse still, a device which misses the acetone at the concentrations you need to be concerned about.

If you had nothing but water and acetone and your required detection limit was 1%, a number of the methods mentioned would work great. But you care about acetone at 100 ppm or even less, and there's no simple sensor which will do that for you unless the water is otherwise quite pure.

You need to solve the problem further up the pipe. Get rid of the acetone use if you can. If you can't, segregate its use and treat only the water that might contain it- or pend it up and batch analyze prior to treatment.

 

[MPelletier]

That's the answer I was afraid of.

I will use reservoir tank and make test on the whole batch before processing it.

Thank you all and have a great 2012 year!

 

[RaRo]

For low concentrations, depending of what are the other light compounds you could have somewhere a small vessel (pressurized if need be) where you could maintain and monitor a gas phase. Desorbing VOC including acetone could be checked (e.g. by NIR).
The pressure will be the main issue: how much do you need, and what is the partial pressure of acetone then - this will affect what you can detect.

You could do that in the reservoir tank you mentionned, but there, the water quantity to treat in case of detection is much larger.