Catch Oil Polluters With Open Source Tools Using the Homebrew Oil Testing Kit

First time accepted submitter jywarren writes Ever wish you could investigate pollution yourself? Public Lab's recently announced open source kit aims to make it possible for anyone to become a "pollution detective" by comparing samples of oil contamination. Under the hood, the kit is pretty interesting. It uses the ultraviolet fluorescence caused by a Blu-Ray laser pen in oil samples, and includes a "papercraft" spectrometer to scan and classify oil types. The group's Kickstarter campaign is also seeking 50 early-access beta testers to help test and refine the kit before release.

Comments

Is this a joke?

[tacokill]

Time to grow up. Homebrew oil testing for big bad oil when you don't even understand the chemistry is a bad idea. This kickstarter looks like it was written up by a 2nd grader.

I bet these guys know a lot more about this than a dinky little kickstarter project. I hope the kickstarter team realizes that they've been identifying, measuring, and studying hydrocarbons for over a century so there's a pretty significant body of work already. Use it.

Re: Is this a joke?

[Mathew_publiclab]

Public lab staff here- Its not a joke. We're replicating a well-researched and straightforward methodology for grading oil based on the relative "blueness" or "redness" of the spectrum. Its very simple to perform. During an oil spill there is a lot of public interest in identifying oils. People collect samples and send them to researchers, and they never get tested. Because testing has a low return--he sample could be anything, and the experts dont have the time. There are tons of coastal oil slicks, many of them naturally occuring from decaying organic matter. Why would it be bad to help people figure out if they're looking at petroleum or not?

Re: Is this a joke?

[OzPeter]

There are tons of coastal oil slicks, many of them naturally occuring from decaying organic matter.

  Why would it be bad to help people figure out if they're looking at petroleum or not?

Then what? What do you expect to be done with the results?

Re: Is this a joke?

[Mathew_publiclab]

We'll release it public domain and use our existing relationships with universities, state DEQs and the EPA to assist in accurately mapping the disaster and recovery. The data would be really useful for figuring out where to deploy more expensive equipment, or to pre-scan for which sites to go back and sample.

Re: Is this a joke?

[Mathew_publiclab]

After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the ERMA SCAT database--the official database-- was built by QUALITATIVE assessements of oil thickness on a 1-4 scale. A civic response with quantitative data collection tools could do better than "well, I think that looks like a 4." So yes. The responsible agencies are rarely capable of deploying enough trained people to actually cover the whole area with the types of expert methods people are mentioning in this thread, so more often than not they rely on estimates and other less-than-quantitative methodologies.

Re:Is this a joke?

[Mathew_publiclab]

Nice job throwing up a googled link to spit FUD when you don't know what you're talking about, tacokill. Spectrasensors.com sell laser absorbance spectroscopy systems operating in the mid-IR range, and don't sell UV fluorescence gear. I see somone before you left a comment detailing our real research [LIDAR, above], which you didn't look at, or you'd notice that we're building on 40 years research into laser fluorescence for field identification of oil. What we're doing was cutting-edge in the early '80's. now it isn't. We aren't trying to do anything new, except use cheap equipment. http://publiclab.org/notes/mat...