News

VidyuthLabs and BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus collaborate on portable electrochemical sensing

VidyuthLabs · 14 October 2026

VidyuthLabs is collaborating with BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus to take portable electrochemistry from the lab bench to the field. The work centres on our AnalyteX portable potentiostat and its applications, starting with sensors that detect heavy metals and other contaminants in water, food and soil.

Why this collaboration

Testing water, food and soil for contaminants still mostly means collecting a sample, shipping it to a central laboratory and waiting days for a result from an instrument such as ICP-MS or atomic absorption spectroscopy. Those instruments are accurate, but they are expensive, lab-bound and far from where the sample is taken.

Electrochemistry offers another route. A potentiostat paired with a small, disposable sensor can measure trace metals and many other analytes in minutes, on site. Making that reliable outside a lab needs work on three fronts at once: the instrument, the sensor surface and the method. That is the kind of problem a startup and a research university solve better together.

What we are working on

• Portable potentiostat applications. Using the AnalyteX handheld potentiostat to run cyclic voltammetry (CV), differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) in the field.
• Heavy-metal sensors. Nanomaterial-coated screen-printed electrodes for metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic in drinking water.
• Food, soil and other contamination. Extending the same one-device, swap-the-sensor approach to food safety and agricultural testing.

What it means for users

Our aim is simple: one affordable handheld instrument, with a sensor for each test, that gives lab-grade electrochemical measurements wherever the sample is. Water utilities, food and seafood businesses, farmers, environmental agencies and research labs should be able to test on the spot instead of waiting on a distant lab.