Rapid evaluation method based on DOM for water quality by microlaser fluorescence spectrometer

In this paper, we report a method for rapid water quality evaluation based on laser-excited dissolved organic matter (DOM) fluorescence and water Raman peak. A formula, which results in the score from 0 to 100, was proposed to evaluate water quality. We first employed this method to evaluate the self-prepared water samples with humic acid or fulvic acid under different concentrations from 0.01 mg/L to 8 mg/L. In these experiments, the water samples were tested by our self-customed microlaser spectrometer. The good correlations between fluorescence intensity of DOM and concentrations of humic acid or fulvic acid were found. These results indicated that the method we proposed is reasonable on the water quality assessment. Furthermore, we evaluated water samples from five different sources and the results consisted well with the general knowledge of the water quality. These results demonstrated that this method offers a number of advantages for water quality evaluation including compact configuration, rapid test process, simple operation, and low cost.