I've seen some good work on #beers-law, which deals with concentration in a liquid sample. Since lots of people are interested in using spectrometers to do this; what kind of experiment design would enable quantitative measurements of turbidity with a DIY spectrometer like one of these?
Question: Can a DIY spectrometer be used to measure water turbidity?
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Hm, good point -- actually going back to an old post there's some great stuff here:
https://publiclab.org/notes/donblair/08-25-2015/turbidity-001
So perhaps turbidity since it measures reflectivity, is not just an analogue for opacity, and Beer's Law may not apply for all contaminants?
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So perhaps turbidity since it measures reflectivity, is not just an analogue for opacity, and Beer's Law may not apply for all contaminants? ){kind=link}
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So a design using the Lego Spectrometer, for example, might need a right-angle light source -- but that's not so bad, since already with fluorescence spectrometry we'd be doing this. Interesting!
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Absolutely correct. The fluorescence spectrometer is the same layout as for the basic turbidimeter.
The standards are a bit of a pain, but quite doable. The ingredients for the standards didn't use to be a problem to get. Maybe that had changed.
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By definition, turbidity measures the amount of light scattered at a 90 angle. So there would have to be a change in the optical layout from the basic spectrometer. You also need to check the specific method referenced. Some instruments are getting quite complex ( ratio recording , etc.). If a method specifies something like that, it can change your optical layout dramatically. Having said that, most turbidimeters are very simple and would be easy to duplicate.
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