Fingerprinting chemical warfare agents using an integrated hand held device with on-chip contactless conductivity detector

This paper describes an integrated hand-held device with a microchip capillary electrophoresis contactless conductivity detection (CCD) system for on-site monitoring of chemical warfare agents (CWA). The device consists of a polycarbonate microchip, a chip loading mechanism, a CCD sensor, a miniaturized high voltage power supply and a graphic/user interface. It is tested and shown to be capable of separating and detecting mixtures of metal ions, CWA and the degradation product samples. The separation and detection of potassium, sodium and lithium ions are demonstrated and the detection limit of potassium is quantified as 1 μM. The CWA degradation products are applied to fingerprint the presence of CWA. It is tested for CWA degradation products by using reversed electroosmotic flow. The results are highly reproducible achieved with attractive sensitivity (1.1 mV/ppm) and separation efficiency (plate number 12900).