Novel Tracers for Environmental Applications

Novel glass tracers, based on narrow band atomic fluorescence, have been developed for deployment as environmental tracers. The use of discrete fluorescent species in an environmentally stable host has been developed to replace existing toxic, broad band molecular dye tracers. The narrow band emission signals offer the potential for the tracing of a large numbers of signals in the same environment. This will give significant competitive advantage and increased data accuracy and also allow multiple source environmental monitoring of environmental parameters. The work presented here aims to outline potential parameters for using lanthanide doped borosilicate glass as environmental tracers.