Ultrasensitive Nanoplastics Detection Leveraging Shrinking Surface Plasmonic Bubble

TL;DR

This paper introduces a highly sensitive SSBD method that uses plasmonic bubbles and SERS to detect nanoplastics at trace levels in water, offering a simpler alternative to traditional detection techniques.

Contribution

The novel SSBD technique combines plasmonic photothermal effects and Marangoni flow to concentrate nanoplastics for ultra-sensitive detection and quantification.

Findings

Detection limits of 10 ng/mL for 500 nm PS particles

Detection limits of 10-1 ng/mL for 200 nm PS particles

Detection limits of 10-3 ng/mL for 30 nm PS particles

Abstract

Nanoplastics pose serious environmental and health risks due to their widespread presence in aquatic systems. Detecting trace amounts of nanoplastics is a challenging task, which currently requires sophisticated equipment and tedious sample preparation (e.g., ultrafiltration). In this work, we demonstrate an ultra-sensitive Shrinking Surface Bubble Deposition (SSBD) technique for nanoplastics detection. SSBD leverages plasmonic photothermal effects to generate a surface bubble and the resulting Marangoni flow to concentrate sparsely suspended nanoplastics onto the bubble surface. The collected nanoplastic particles are subsequently deposited on the substrate after the bubble shrinks and vanishes. To quantify the detection limit of SSBD for nanoplastics in water, core-shell gold plasmonic nanoparticles are mixed with the aqueous sample to enable photothermal bubble generation, while also supporting surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) for signal enhancement. Results show that the limits of detection are 10 ng/mL, 10-1 ng/mL and 10-3 ng/mL for polystyrene (PS) particles with diameters of 500 nm, 200 nm and 30 nm, respectively. We further used SSBD to detect plastics particles in real drinking water (e.g., bottled and fountain water) and found polyamides (PA) and polypropylene (PP) micro/nanoplastics, demonstrating the potential of the SSBD-SERS technique as a versatile and sensitive platform for detecting trace-level nanoplastic contamination and assessing human exposure risk.