Capacitive sensing technique for silt suspended sediment concentration monitoring

Abstract

Automated, real-time, and continuous techniques for monitoring suspended sediment concentration in rivers and reservoirs can play an important role in the improvement of the quantity and quality of sediment data, and are valuable to the management of water environment, water conservancy, hazard prevention, and water resources. Research in the monitoring techniques has examined the possibility of using the characteristics of dielectric constants for detecting soil moisture and concentration of air-water two-phase flow, based on the fact that dielectric constants of sediment, air and water are different. A capacitance sensor was developed to monitor the silt suspended sediment concentration (SSSC) in a recent study, following the principle that as SSSC increases in the sediment-water mixture, the apparent dielectric constant of the water sample also increases and therefore the capacitance detected by the sensing system also increases. It is demonstrated that the variations in the concentration of silt sediment correlates positively with the variations in observed capacitance in a linear fashion, and correlates negatively with voltage outputs but also in a linear fashion. The correlation coefficients reached above 0.98. The overall errors in estimated concentrations range between 0.26% and 2.91%. Elements in the capacitance sensor system such as the frequencies of the signal generating system, areas of the electrode plates, and effects of sample temperature have also been evaluated. The results illustrated that the capacitance sensor techniques can be applied to monitoring SSSC automatically and continuously. Also, the range of SSSC in the experiment reached 200 kg/m 3; therefore, the application of this technique in practical SSSC monitoring is worthy of further research.