Project Overview

Contamination of the environment by heavy metals is responsible for the increase of pollution and affects different areas of the world. The heavy metals released in the terrestrial environment tend to concentrate in the soil, becoming a large reservoir available to the roots of the plants, vulnerable to the concentration variation of these elements. In recent years, the analysis of trace elements in plant leaves has been used as a potential biomonitoring method. However, chemical analysis are expensive and time-consuming processes. The innovation of our work is to make possible the application of two techniques that involve less cost and time than the conventional ones, allowing to make a monitoring of the environmental contamination with equipment widely used with other goals.
The dielectric properties of leaves of the inula spiraeifolia plant were determined with the objective of investigating their applicability to monitor environmental pollution. In parallel, the same technique was applied to contaminated water with different concentrations of heavy metals.