Unattended Monitoring of Heavy Metals. New Methods making this Possible with the SensAqua ATMS500 Equipment

New methods enabling automatic and unattended monitoring of heavy metals are presented, discussed and compared with laboratory methods. The requirements for such monitoring are: Long-time stability of the measuring system i.e. sufficiently long periods between required manual maintenance Acceptable sensitivity No use of toxic materials in the measuring system like liquid mercury and mercury salts Not too expensive installation costs, this to allow installation of several units, and also considering that the remote installations might be stolen or destroyed Presence of electricity (solar cells and batteries can be used if frost is not present) Availability of Internet or another telecommunication system Electroanalytical monitoring methods are the only ones following the mentioned requirements. Here we need: Sufficient high overvoltage to allow the measurements without interferences from hydrogen gas formation Sufficient long term stability without need of maintenance Sufficient sensitivity to allow monitoring of the pollutants That non-toxic material is used (very important for off-laboratory methods) Not too expensive material needed. We have developed Voltammetric equipment with our patented sensor electrodes to perform such measurements (ATMS500) and this is presented. This opens for improved monitoring of the environment, as well as new possibilities in environmental research. Finally, the coming generation of the system (ATMS600) is described, with improved performance.