CHE 598 Seminar
About the event
Daniel Molina earned his Bachelor’s Degree and Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Costa Rica. After gaining industry experience in heat exchange and process control, he worked for information technology companies such as Dell and Accenture while also working as a college instructor until he fully returned to Academia in 2014 working as instructor at his alma mater, the University of Costa Rica. During his Master’s Degree he worked on the preconcentration of heavy metals on bio sorbents. He began the Chemical Engineering Ph.D. program at Washington State University in the summer of 2017 and his research focus is the preconcentration and detection of f-block elements for nuclear forensics using electrochemical and microfluidics devices. In 2019 he published his first paper in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society and in 2018 presented his work at the 233rd Electrochemical Society Meeting and a poster at the Interagency Technical Nuclear Forensics Technical Review at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Electrochemical Microfluidic Devices for F-Element Preconcentration and Detection
Fast, portable and sensitive detection of lanthanide and actinide elements is vital in the fields of nuclear forensics, nuclear fuel cycle monitoring and environmental monitoring, yet current lab equipment is stationary, expensive and usually require laborious sample processing for trace and ultra-trace detection levels. Microfluidics is a developing field for analytical applications, with lab-on-a-chip operations replacing traditional laboratory techniques, permitting the analysis of sample volumes in the order of microliters, reducing sample size, cost, hazards and processing times. Sensitive electroanalytical methods that use simple instrumentation have been demonstrated in microfluidic chips, combining the benefits of microelectrodes with the advantages of microchannels, but further development of microfluidic devices for rapid f-element detection is still needed. Preconcentration of the analyte is usually required to increase the limit of detection and I am particularly interested in the hydrodynamic preconcentration on flow chips, where controlled mass transport is predictable by numerical simulation and can be coupled in line with different analytical techniques. In this seminar I will discuss the use of electrochemical and other analytical methods in combination with microfluidics, their modeling with a finite element method and applicability to f-element detection.