Monitoring the leaching of microplastics and nanoplastics from bottles into pure ultrapure water
Continuously measuring plastic particle contamination and the leaching processes of different polypropylene bottles and comparing them to glass bottles.
Challenge
Katharina Heider (a researcher at a leading Austrian university) was unable to obtain insights into leaching from polypropylene bottles until she performed OF2i® measurements.
Previously there was no technology available to measure concentrations down to a few particles per milliliter.
- No possibility for live or time-resolved measurements
to monitor particle concentrations. - The particle concentrations are very low and therefore a very large sample is required.
- The results of such low concentrations are not statistically relevant and almost impossible to measure with other methods.
Figure 1: Steps of the experiment © BRAVE Analytics and Katharina Heider
Figure 2: Time-resolved particle concentrations measured in plastic and glass bottles with baseline © BRAVE Analytics
Experiment
In the experiment, Katharina sterilized the bottles according to the manufacturer’s recommendations and performed various cleaning procedures using 20-nm-microfiltrated ultrapure water. No further sample preparation was required.
- After taking the baseline concentration Katharina measured the particle concentration in glass and plastic bottles and repeated the cleaning and measuring procedure three times.
- They discovered that different contaminations are seen for different cleaning procedures.
- For the experiment, a relatively large sample had to be pumped through the analyzer over a long period of time, in this case 50 minutes.
One of the takeaways from the experiment is that particles are leaching into the liquid as soon as the liquid is in the plastic bottle.
Figure 3: Particles detected in plastic and glass bottles after cleaning cycles with baseline © BRAVE Analytics and Katharina Heider
Configuration of the setup:
BRAVE B-Curious device for particle sizing with Fluid Automation Module, Control and Evaluation Module and software
The analysis setup used in this case
BRAVE B-Curious determines the particle size distributions of polydisperse systems with single-particle sensitivity.
Delivers automated, continuous and time-resolved results.
Detects ultra-low particle concentrations as well as large-particle tails, LPC, anomalies and outliers.
Is the required base station for all other modules (except BRAVE B-Phat standalone).
