Development and Implementation of Water Quality Assessment Monitoring (WQAM) System using the Internet of Things (IoT) in Water Environment

Abstract

Water quality monitoring (WQM) system is widely being explored as it is needed to prevent the problem of water contamination worldwide. Nowadays, there are various studies on WQM system that are being integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) concept for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology implementation to get real time data measurement. Traditional ways of collecting the data are more time consuming and they lack real time changes in the quality of water. This paper presents the development and implementation of Water Quality Assessment and Monitoring (WQAM) system. The system development used WiFi enabled microcontroller to connect with the IoT environment and store the data in the IoT cloud server. The microcontroller used is Arduino UNO that interacts with three types of sensor probes which are pH, turbidity and temperature probe. All the data measurements is transferred using a WiFi module which is ESP8266. The IoT cloud used to utilize the data frame is ThingSpeak. This system was implemented on Bandar Perda Lake and Derhaka River in Pulau Pinang with two systems implemented at each location. The sensors were placed on the water surface for more accurate measurements. This system continuously measures the readings of pH, turbidity dan temperature on the lake/river for every 1 hour. Twenty readings were taken for every 1 hour within the first 20 minutes with 1 minute interval and the readings were stored in the IoT cloud server. The readings are accessible via ThingSpeak GUI. In conclusion, this system would benefit the authorities to take advantage of using the WQAM system with the aid of the IoT that is less time consuming, less cost and more reliable in real time data reading.