A team led by Prof. Alasdair Clark and Prof. Caroline Gauchotte-Lindsay has turned a promising lab invention into a rugged, portable chemical-fingerprinting tool that’s now being put to work with the Faroe Islands Water Authority and at Scottish Water treatment sites. In Tórshavn, our system has already been used by the national testing laboratory to fingerprint diverse real-world samples—from reservoirs and rivers to aquaculture and factory discharges—providing rapid, on-site readouts that can be correlated with existing lab measurements to deliver instant insight.
At Scottish Water, the tool is tackling a long-standing industry headache: taste and odour compounds from algae blooms, notably geosmin and 2-MIB. We’re now measuring these molecules in the field, in real time, at 5 ng/L—to our knowledge, a first for the water industry—opening the door to proactive treatment rather than chasing problems after they’ve reached customers’ taps. Scottish Water’s experience underscores the impact: today’s workflows depend on shipping samples to central labs for GC-MS, which burns time and budget and forces operators to dose reactively; a deployable on-site tool changes that equation.
The pace of this progress comes from a tight lab–field loop. Dr. Justin Sperling and Dr. Baptiste Poursat are leading the experimental charge—flying across Europe to run trials with utilities and regulators while feeding data back into our models for rapid iteration. In parallel, lab campaigns are building the long-term intelligence the industry needs. Along the Almond River, we’re correlating the sensor’s fingerprints with seasonal shifts and pollution events, so the tool can be trained to recognise these signatures automatically when deployed in the wild. And in controlled studies we’re showing fast identification of a wide range of micropollutants—pharmaceuticals, hormones and more—without the delays and costs of mass-spectrometry.
How it works (in brief): our platform mimics biology. A glass chip patterned with many cross-reactive, nanostructured gold regions produces a rich, optical “taste” of any liquid that flows across it. Instead of hunting a single target, it captures a holistic chemical fingerprint that analytics can interpret instantly—classifying treatment stages, flagging anomalies, or pinpointing contaminant classes and, in many cases, specific molecules. The same universal hardware can be turned toward almost any sensing problem: drinking-water protection, industrial QA/QC, aquaculture, hydroponics, and environmental surveillance.
Why it matters: Moving sensing from the lab to the point-of-need delivers results in seconds rather than days. That means earlier warnings, smarter dosing, fewer trucked samples, and a step-change in resilience as climate-driven events make water quality more volatile. It’s a practical route to continuous, data-driven water management—and it’s happening now, with live deployments and utility partners in place.
Project leads: Prof. Alasdair Clark; Prof. Caroline Gauchotte-Lindsay; Dr. William Peveler. Experimental leads: Dr. Justin Sperling; Dr. Baptiste Poursat.
For collaboration enquiries or media contact, please reach out to the team.
