Continuous monitoring of wastewater and process water — in the channel or the pipe, without drawing a sample and without reagents.
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Illegal discharges are not steady. They are short, they are timed badly on purpose, and hydrocarbons travel on the surface rather than mixing in. Three buckets a day is not a monitoring strategy — it is a lottery.
Petroleum-derived hydrocarbons are less dense than water, so they move along the surface rather than mixing through the profile. Where the sample is taken from decides what the laboratory will find — before any analysis happens.
Petroleum hydrocarbons, with a density lower than water, flow along the surface; illegal discharges are intermittent — which is why sampling does not catch them. dr Karolina Orłowska, CSO · Industry Alarm
A day with three events, each lasting minutes. Nothing about them is steady, and none of them announces itself. In the aggregate figures at the end of the month they may not appear at all.
Scheduled sampling at 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00 lands in the quiet windows between the events. The results come back clean, the file says compliant, and the discharge that happened at 04:04 is not in any record.
An analyser in the channel measures the flow itself, without drawing samples and without reagents. Water is a weak Raman scatterer, so the substances carried in it stay visible rather than being drowned by the matrix.
Water is invisible to us — we focus on the substances in it, without distorting the picture. dr Bartosz Kawa, CTO · INNPoland
With MPWiK Wrocław — continuous monitoring of wastewater for petroleum-derived substances, mounted in a day, no reagents and no wear parts. Continuous detection of microplastics and PFAS is in development, using SERS.
The same analyser, aimed at four different questions — all measured directly in the flow.
Hydrocarbons — petrol, xylenes, toluenes — tracked in the discharge itself rather than in a sample taken minutes or hours later.
The standard eutrophication indicators for a wastewater stream, measured continuously instead of on a sampling schedule.
NH₃ and H₂S on-line, used for corrosion and odour control on streams where both build up quickly and unevenly.
In development: what would be the first commercial system for continuous microplastic and PFAS detection, with microplastics addressed via SERS.
Every figure below carries its own source and its own segment. Water economics are not resin economics.
Two things worth saying plainly before anyone reads this as more than it is.
In this segment Spectrally is a screening tool that complements laboratory testing — it does not replace it. Poland's 2019 wastewater act does not yet provide for continuous monitoring, so formally this sits as an additional layer on top of the required laboratory regime, not a substitute for it.
The commercial model we are aiming for is a subscription in the range of a few thousand PLN per month. For a large utility that is a rounding error against the cost of a missed discharge. For a smaller municipality it can be a genuine barrier.
Mounting and commissioning. Mains power, or a battery swapped roughly every two weeks — no reagents, no wear parts. This number belongs to the water segment.
Water is invisible to us — we focus on the substances in it, without distorting the picture. dr Bartosz Kawa, CTO · INNPoland
Two figures for context, held at arm's length from any claim about what our instrument does or would have done.
A recurring reference point for the gap this segment addresses: contamination detected late, with little hard evidence of where it came from. That is a statement about the systemic gap — not a claim that continuous monitoring at any one site would have caught that event.
Estimates of daily microplastic intake range from roughly 1,260 to 9,800 particles per person, depending on the study. Continuous detection of microplastics and PFAS in water is in development at Gekko, using SERS — not yet a shipped capability.
A block diagram or a description of the discharge point is usually enough to say whether continuous monitoring changes anything here, and what it would take to mount it.