Abstract
This paper reports on a low-cost turbidity sensor design for continuous on-line water quality monitoring applications. The measurement of turbidity by agricultural and environmental scientists is restricted by the current cost and functionality of available commercial instruments. Although there are a number of low-cost turbidity sensors exploited within domestic ‘white-goods’, such as dishwashers, the lack of sensitivity, and power-usage of these devices make them unsuitable for fresh-water quality monitoring purposes. The recent introduction of wireless protocols and hardware, associated with the ‘Internet-of-Things’ concept for machine-to-machine autonomous sensing and control, has enabled the large-scale networked intelligent water turbidity monitoring system that implements relatively low-cost sensors to be developed. The proposed sensor uses both transmitted light and orthogonal (90 degrees) scattered light detection principles, and is 2–3 orders of magnitude lower in cost compared to the existing commercial turbidity sensors. With an 850-nm infrared LED, and dual orthogonal photodetectors, the proposed design is capable of measuring turbidity within the range of 0–1000 Nephelometric Turbidity Unit (NTU) with improved accuracy and robustness as compared with the existing low cost turbidity sensors. The combination of orthogonal and transmitted light detection unit provides both 0–200 NTU high resolution and accuracy sensing and 0–1000 NTU lower resolution and accuracy sensing capability. Results from calibration experiment are presented, which proved that the proposed sensor design produced comparable turbidity readings as that of a commercial turbidity sensor.
Highlights
W ATER quality monitoring plays a vitally important role in everyday life
Considering the need for higher precision and accuracy within the detection range of 0-100 Nephelometric Turbidity Unit (NTU), a more sophisticated design approach, as compared to using a simpler transmitted light detection design, to measure the NTU [2] is applied for the design and follows ISO7027 Standard [18]
The transmitted light detection unit is configured to become the primary source of the measurement, which could provide sensed turbidity values to over 1000 NTU
Summary
W ATER quality monitoring plays a vitally important role in everyday life. Fresh-water quality management is heavily reliant on the instrumentation used. Parameters such as turbidity, colour, ambient temperature, etc. Are often being utilised for this duty [1]. The level of suspended particulates within the aqueous stream, or bulk turbidity (‘haziness’), provides a proxy measure for indicating an abnormal event, such as soil, residue and nutrients losses to the surrounding. Manuscript received February 7, 2018; revised April 8, 2018; accepted April 9, 2018. Date of publication April 13, 2018; date of current version May 9, 2018. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was Dr Rosario Morello. (Corresponding author: Bruce Grieve.)
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