A Portable Lab-on-a-chip Instrument Based on Microchip Electrophoresis with Contactless Conductivity Detector with Replaceable Detection Cell for Ornamental Fish Farms Application

Ornamental fish ponds requires continuous control of water quality such as salt content (salinity), hardness (Ca, Mg), and ionic contents particularly nitrate and ammonium. Conductivity is considered as a parameter correlates with these parameters and sensitive to environmental conditions such as temperature. Therefore, a conductivity detector can be employed for control of water quality in aquaculture. In this paper we have developed a compact portable lab-on-a-chip instrument based on microchip electrophoresis and capacitive coupled contactless conductivity detection (C 4 D) optimized for conductivity measurements at different environmental conditions and quantitative analyses of anions in Ornamental fish aquarium water tanks. The instrument is battery powered with total dimension of 14×25×8 cm 3 (w×l×h), and weighs 1.2 kg with a compact portable design based on microchip electrophoresis and dual capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (dC 4 D). The particular application of the system for Ornamental fish farms water quality monitoring for toxic ions of nitrate and nitrite were evaluated. Our multielemental fast reliable E-dC 4 D instrument has proven to be a perfect analytical sensor for quantitative and qualitative monitoring of fish water tanks. The results have shown an acceptable comparison with respect to the costly laboratory standard techniques and highly precise compared to calorimetric probes that currently popular in fish farm industry.