Environmental Monitoring System Research Articles

Environmental airborne tritium monitoring system based on absorption of tritiated water on calcium chloride.

Environmental monitoring of tritium around nuclear facilities is conducted in order to demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements on the protection of members of the public. Multiple techniques are used to monitor its concentration in air, soil and flora. A new monitoring system was developed, which is based on the absorption of tritiated water on Calcium Chloride grains. Calcium Chloride has an improved capability to absorb water vapor, compared with other absorbents/adsorbents: it can absorb water vapor as much as three times its own weight. The Calcium Chloride is inserted inside a plastic bag where it interacts with environmental vapor through a membrane filter "window". The tritium absorption rate is then controlled by adjusting the free area of the membrane filter. After the determination of the tritium activity absorbed in the calcium chloride using a liquid scintillation system, a model is used to estimate its airborne concentration, considering the environmental conditions.

Methodological Aspects of Local Natural and Technical System Assessment Based on the Results of Environmental Monitoring

The concept of a natural-technical system is considered as a set of man-made and natural objects located on a single territory is considered. The environmental safety of the natural and technical system is ensured by limiting the negative impact on the environment from a technogenic object. It is noted that the regulation of the negative impact is necessary but not sufficient condition for environmental safety, since it is primarily focused on the implementation of sanitary and hygienic standards in relation to the people’s living or working conditions on the territory of a natural and technical system. The use of sanitary and hygienic maximum allowable concentrations in assessing the transformation of environmental objects is not very informative. It is noted that in the regular functioning conditions of a man-made object, the information basis for assessing negative changes in the environment is the results of environmental monitoring. Environmental monitoring systems are developed mostly for highly hazardous production facilities in terms of organizing the obtaining quantitative data on environmental pollution. The issues of quantitative assessment of the ecological state of the territory have not been adequately considered. The indicators used in the form of aggregated convolutional indices are still focused on sanitary and hygienic standards. In addition, their information content is reduced due to the cross-correlation of indicators used in the calculation in the form of pollutant concentrations. It is noted that objects of flora and fauna are more sensitive to negative impacts, and therefore, along with the quantitative chemical analysis of the pollution of the territory, monitoring of the biotic component of the environment is carried out. At the same time, biomonitoring data are considered as independent results. The relationship between general desirability function in assessing the state of biocenoses and other characteristics of the territory, including its pollution, is usually not studied, which also reduces their informational value. Based on the analysis of the considered materials, it was concluded that for an informative assessment and forecast of the ecological state of the natural and technical system, the development of integral indices of the biotic and abiotic components of the environment in their relationship is required.

Information on waste generated as a result of war: the issue of legal protection

The article is devoted to the analysis of the state of legal provision of access to information about waste generated as a result of war, the identification of problematic aspects in this area and the development of proposals for overcoming them.
 The relevance of the study is due to the need to develop a legal field that would take into account a new phenomenon for Ukraine - the treatment of waste generated as a result of war and allow to ensure the implementation of the constitutional right of everyone to access information about such waste in the context of access to environmental information as effectively as possible.
 The work analyzes the amendments to the legislation on environmental information. A conclusion was made about the expediency of the existing changes in terms of clarifying the meaningful content of the term «environmental information», including by supplementing it with «waste information» and its compliance with international acts. The updated legislation on waste management was studied. A conclusion was made about the beginning of the formation of special secondary legislation on the management of waste generated as a result of war.
 It was determined that even under martial law, environmental information, including waste information, cannot be restricted. Access to it may be difficult for objective reasons (due to technical reasons, in temporarily occupied territories, etc.). Public access to environmental information is one of the factors in the effective development of reconstruction plans (especially at the local level), ensuring proper control over the implementation of measures, preserving people’s lives and health.
 It is proposed to speed up the entry into force of the Law of Ukraine «On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine Regarding the State System of Environmental Monitoring, Information on the State of the Environment (Environmental Information) and Information Support for Management in the Field of the Environment» without reference to the end of martial law as such, which will serve quality update of legislation on access to environmental information. The need to define and establish at the level of the Law of Ukraine «On Waste Management» the concept of «waste generated as a result of war», as well as the provision of this category in the National List of Waste, is substantiated. Inconsistency of the Regulation on data sets to be made public in the form of open data of the Law of Ukraine «On Waste Management» in the part of the list of such data on waste was established. The need to eliminate this shortcoming is argued.

Computer aided design automation for triboelectric nanogenerators

For application of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG), it is essential to design TENG with high energy conversion efficiency, and it is one of the crucial parts to obtain TENG designs with optimal output impedance to match with that of application systems. Current design processes are incapable of optimizing TENGs with complex structures effectively, which greatly prolongs the research and development process and hinders application of TENGs. Here, a universal computer aided design automation is proposed to generate the structural and material design of TENG for optimal power output under designated matching resistance. A semi-analytical method and a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) are used for the design automation. For demonstration, design automation for freestanding rotational TENG (FR-TENG) is carried out. An acceleration factor of up to ∼900 is obtained with systematical simulation acceleration. A group of designs with optimal powers and matching resistances are obtained, from which different input impedances of power management units can be obtained for applications. For verification, a FR-TENG with an optimal average output power over 88 mW is designed and fabricated, the output impedance is intentionally chosen from pareto-optimal front to match the input impedance of the subsequent power management unit. This is used to develop a fully self-powered wireless humidity/temperature/ultraviolet environmental monitoring system. This system can transmit the sensing information every ∼ 7 s and display on a remote terminal, validating the effectiveness of the proposed design automation method.

Двухуровневый цифровой экологический мониторинг городов горно-металлургического комплекса Урала

Introduction. The main approach to the development of modern cities is an approach based on the balance of social, economic, and environmental subsystems, within the framework of which plans to achieve sustainable growth are implemented. In the era of digitalization, the most important condition for effective environmental management is the use of advanced tools for analyzing data obtained during the environmental monitoring procedure. Materials and methods. The methodology for monitoring the state of various components of the environment involves a number of sequential operations. The first stage of the study (obtaining a priori information) pursues the goal of creating a landscape-geochemical basis on which information about typical elementary landscapes reflecting the structure of the area is placed. The second stage includes obtaining operational information about the state of selected environmental components using field and laboratory methods. At the third stage, desk processing of information is carried out. Results. The structure of environmental monitoring can be divided into levels in accordance with the degree of detail of the tasks assigned to it. The most appropriate division of environmental monitoring in cities for the conditions of the Urals seems to be the following levels: a) local, examining the state of the environment as a whole in the city or on the border of the sanitary protection zone of an enterprise and b) detailed, examining the state of the environment from the impact of waste disposal facilities. Discussion. In the field of environmental monitoring, a digital database should be created at the local and detailed levels, with the help of which it is possible to conduct analysis and further forecast the state of the environment, with the subsequent development of environmental measures. Environmental monitoring within cities with a mining and metallurgical complex must be carried out comprehensively, including the atmosphere, surface water, soil, snow cover, groundwater and vegetation. Conclusion. Thus, the proposed environmental monitoring system is characterized by high environmental and economic efficiency, which meets the requirements of sustainable development at the present stage. Resume. For the cities of the mining and metallurgical complex of the Urals, it is necessary to conduct two-level environmental monitoring with the development, implementation and dissemination of digital technologies in the environmental sphere. Environmental monitoring within cities with a mining and metallurgical complex must be carried out comprehensively, including the atmosphere, surface water, soil, snow cover, groundwater and vegetation. Conducting local monitoring in the territory of influence of the enterprise and detailed monitoring in the zone of influence of waste disposal facilities presupposes the presence of stable observations in the space-time interval and a stable ingredient composition. The instability of observations leads to deterioration of the analysis, which reduces the quality of the forecast of the situation and recommendations for preventive measures. Suggestions for practical applications and directions for future research. The research results can be useful in the formation of a data bank on the state of the environment for the development and adoption of environmental measures with high environmental and economic efficiency at industrial facilities of the mining and metallurgical complex.

Development of an Environmental Monitoring System Based on Spatial Marking and Machine Vision Technologies

Introduction. The use of available satellite images and aerial photography by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the tasks of environmental monitoring is challenged by the imperfection of existing tools. Geographic information systems are characterized by insufficient flexibility to automatically work with heterogeneous sources. The latest models based on artificial intelligence in ecology require preliminary data preparation. The article presents the results of designing a software system for environmental monitoring based on machine vision sensor data, which provides data unification while being flexible both in terms of data sources and methods of their analysis.Aim. Creation of a generalized software system for coordinated spatial marking of heterogeneous machine vision data for environmental monitoring tasks.Materials and methods. Software engineering methods, database theory methods, spatial markup methods, image processing methods.Results. A generalized method for unifying data was developed. The method is based on the analysis of existing open data from remote sensing of the Earth, as well as UAV aerial photography and approaches to environmental monitoring. To implement the method, a flexible architecture of the software system was designed, and a data model for a document-oriented DBMS was developed, which allows storing data and scaling the data analysis procedure.Conclusion. The existing sources of data and tools for environmental monitoring were analyzed. A generalized method for unifying machine vision data, an architecture, and a data model was created. The method, architecture, and model were successfully implemented as a software system with a web interface

Retracted: Design of Ecological Environment Monitoring System Based on Internet of Things Technology

Retracted: Design of Ecological Environment Monitoring System Based on Internet of Things Technology

H‐BN‐Encapsulated Uncooled Infrared Photodetectors Based on Tantalum Nickel Selenide

AbstractUncooled broadband spectrum detection, spanning from visible to mid‐wave‐infrared regions, offers immense potential for applications in environmental monitoring, optical telecommunications, and radar systems. While leveraging proven technologies, conventional mid‐wave‐infrared photodetectors are encumbered by high dark currents and the necessity for cryogenic cooling. Correspondingly, innovative low‐dimensional materials like black phosphorus manifest weak photoresponse and instability. Here, tantalum nickel selenide (Ta2NiSe5) infrared photodetectors with an operational wavelength range from 520 nm to 4.6 µm, utilizing a hexagonal boron nitride (h‐BN) encapsulation technique are introduced. The h‐BN encapsulated metal‐Ta2NiSe5‐metal photodetector demonstrates a responsivity of 0.86 A W−1, a noise equivalent power of 1.8 × 10−11 W Hz−1/2, and a peak detectivity of 8.75 × 108 cm Hz1/2 W−1 at 4.6 µm under ambient conditions. Multifaceted mechanisms of photocurrent generation in the novel device prototype subject are scrutinized to varying wavelengths of radiation, by characterizing the temporal‐, bias‐, power‐, and temperature‐dependent photoresponse. Moreover, the photopolarization dependence is delved and concealed‐target imaging is demonstrated, which exhibits polarization angle sensitivity and high‐fidelity imaging across the visible, short‐wave, and mid‐wave‐infrared bands. The observations, which reveal versatile detection modalities, propose Ta2NiSe5 as a promising low‐dimensional material for advanced applications in nano‐optoelectronic device.

Development of River Flow and Water Quality Using IOT-based Smart Buoys Environment Monitoring System

Efficient and accurate river water quality monitoring is needed to support laboratory testing based on on-site sampling. Therefore, we have developed a monitoring system for river flow and water quality using sensor-equipped buoys and the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. An ESP32 NodeMCU microcontroller integrated with WiFi and compatible with Arduino IDE is used in the system. The buoy is equipped with GPS to determine the position and flow speed and sensors to measure water quality parameters of pH and temperature. Data on position, flow velocity, and water quality parameters are transmitted over a WiFi network using the MQTT protocol. The data is recorded by the buoy and uploaded and displayed on the adafruit.io platform. Positioning was done by comparing the values displayed on the Neo-6M GPS with the Maps application on the smartphone. The results show that the GPS coordinate values are accurate. The water quality parameter values obtained have an error rate of 3.3% for the pH sensor and 1.02% for the temperature sensor. Thus, the system we have developed has the potential to be used as a substitute for field sampling-based river water quality monitoring systems.

Hydrogel-based intelligent greenhouse films for simultaneous fogging prevention and indoor environmental monitoring

Fogging prevention and environmental monitoring in a greenhouse are usually accomplished by different components, as the former relies on persistent surface-wetting capability, while the latter requires conductivity or capacitance to vary with ambient conditions. Combining these seemingly unrelated functions presents a significant challenge. Here, we report an all-in-one hydrogel that integrates these exclusive functions, enabling it to simultaneously work as an anti-fogging coating and environmental monitor in greenhouses. The strategy involves constructing loosely crosslinked hydrophilic networks enriched with abundant free ions and a specific amount of glycerol. The transparent hydrogel, composed of long-chain polymers, exhibits excellent adhesion to the inner surface of the greenhouse film and significantly decreases its water contact angle by filmwise condensation, thereby reinforcing the anti-fogging properties of the film without sacrificing its transparency. Meanwhile, the presence of glycerol and free ions enables the gel to sustain a wide range of temperature and humidity while displaying environmentally sensitive conductivity, endowing the gel with the same function as conventional rigid environmental sensors. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, a wireless indoor environmental monitoring system in a homemade lean-to greenhouse is established by utilizing hydrogel as the sensing module, which also performs well in prohibiting fogging on the greenhouse film. We hope this work could provide some inspiration for the development of multifunctional intelligent greenhouse films.

Temporal trends in microplastic accumulation in placentas from pregnancies in Hawaiʻi

Microplastics are created for commercial use, are shed from textiles, or result from the breakdown of larger plastic items. Recent reports have shown that microplastics accumulate in human tissues and may have adverse health consequences. Currently, there are no standardized environmental monitoring systems to track microplastic accumulation within human tissues. Using Raman spectroscopy, we investigated the temporal exposures to plastic pollution in Hawaiʻi and noted a significant increase in the accumulation of microplastics in discarded placentas over the past 15 years, with changes in the size and chemical composition of the polymers. These findings provide a rare insight into the vulnerability and sensitivity of Pacific Island residents to plastic pollution and illustrate how discarded human tissues can be used as an innovative environmental plastic pollution monitoring system.

Self-powered system for environment and aeolian vibration monitoring in the high-voltage transmission system by multi-directional wind-driven triboelectric nanogenerator

The concentration of abundant wind energy on the high-voltage transmission tower with the feature of high height not only provides a promising solution for powering distributed sensors in smart grid, but also enables a potential feasibility for the real-time sensing of the multi-directional wind to evaluate the transmission line aeolian vibration induced by wind excitation. In this paper, the comprehensive strategy appropriately hybridizes the ingenious integration of a rotating-type TENG for efficient wind energy harvesting and a flapping-type TENG for multi-directional wind vector sensing to establish the self-powered multi-directional wind-driven triboelectric nanogenerator (SMW-TENG). The basic D-TENG and F-TENG in terms of structural parameters and response characteristics are systematically optimized to realize an efficient energy harvesting with the peak power of 3.9 mW, a smooth output in the wind speed of 3.7–16.3 m s−1 and sensitive response to eight-direction wind speed ranging from 2.6 to 13.5 m s−1. Hybrid power supply strategy based on collaborative working of UD-TENG as a standby power and LD-TENG as a main power is innovatively proposed to prolong the continues power supply of a Bluetooth temperature and humidity sensor by 70% and 126.7% compared to the single module, respectively. Importantly, the F-TENG equipped with an eight-channel signal acquisition and processing is developed to achieve the multi-directional wind vector information in response to the aeolian vibration. Furthermore, a self-powered ambient weather and multichannel wind vector sensing system based on the SMW-TENG, a hybrid power supply circuit, an eight-channel signal acquisition circuit and a Bluetooth module is developed to comprehensively realize the real-time monitoring of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction. The abnormal wire vibration alarm can be realized through monitoring the wind direction angle on the transmission line cross-section, thereby exhibiting a great potential for developing self-powered sensing in the field of smart grids.

Reforming the state environmental monitoring system in Ukraine

Reforming the state environmental monitoring system in Ukraine

Internet of things driven multilinear regression technique for fertilizer recommendation for precision agriculture

Food instability has been linked to infertility, health issues, accelerated aging, incorrect insulin regulation, and more. Innovative approaches increased food availability and quality. Agriculture environment monitoring systems need IoT and machine learning. IoT sensors provide all necessary data for agriculture production forecast, fertilizer management, smart irrigation, crop monitoring, crop disease diagnosis, and pest control. Precision agriculture may boost crop yields by prescribing the right water-fertilizer-paste ratio. This article presents IOT based fertilizer recommendation system for Smart agriculture. This framework uses IoT devices and sensors to acquire agriculture-related data, and then machine learning is applied to suggest fertilizer in the correct quantity and at the appropriate time. The data acquisition phase collects input data, including soil temperature, moisture, humidity, regions' weather data, and crop details. Features are selected using the Sequential Forward Floating Selection algorithm. Multilinear Regression performs data classification. The performance of SFSS-MLR is compared to Random Forest, C4.5, Naïve Bayes algorithm. SFSS MLR is better in accuracy, precision, recall and F1. The accuracy of SFSS MLR is 99.3 percent.

A High-Performance Circularly Polarized and Harmonic Rejection Rectenna for Electromagnetic Energy Harvesting.

This paper presents a novel circularly polarized rectenna designed for efficient electromagnetic energy harvesting at the 2.45 GHz ISM band. A compact antenna structure is designed to achieve high performance in terms of radiation efficiency, axial ratio, directivity, effective area, and harmonic rejection over the entire bandwidth of the ISM frequency band. The optimized rectifier circuit enhances the RF harvested energy efficiency, with an AC-to-DC conversion efficiency ranging from 36% to 70% for low-level input power ranging from -10 dBm to 0 dBm. The stable output of DC power confirms the suitability of this design for various practical applications, including wireless sensor networks, energy harvesting power supplies, medical implants, and environmental monitoring systems. Experimental validation, which includes both the reflection coefficient and radiation patterns of the designed antenna, confirms the accuracy of the simulation. The study found that the proposed energy harvesting system has a high total efficiency ranging from 53% to 63% and is well-suited for low-power energy harvesting (0 dBm) from ambient electromagnetic radiation. The proposed circularly polarized rectenna is a competitive option for efficient electromagnetic energy harvesting, both as a standalone unit and in an array, due to its high performance, feasibility, and versatility in meeting various energy harvesting requirements. This makes it a promising and cost-effective solution for various wireless communication applications, offering great potential for efficient energy harvesting from ambient electromagnetic radiation.

Firebug Optimized Modified Bee Colony Algorithm for Trusted WSN Routing

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become a crucial technology because they are used in several contexts, such as public safety, environmental monitoring, healthcare, military operations, and surveillance systems. The applications of WSNs have increased because they can be deployed in areas where cable and power supply are difficult to use. However, a variety of security assaults can easily penetrate these networks. To solve this problem, a Firebug Optimized Modified Bee Colony algorithm (FOMBC) has been proposed, which achieves the maximum network security goal with lower energy consumption in WSN. The proposed method is carried out into two phases namely Secure node selection and Orthogonal Routing (OR). In the first phase, secure node among the WSN’s initial nodes is selected based on characteristics such as trust, delay, and Quality of Services. In the second phase, Firebug Optimized Modified Bee Colony (FOMBC) Optimization technique is used to find optimal route based on factors like trust, distance, latency, and quality of service. The effectiveness of the proposed FOMBC approach is evaluated against existing techniques like Trust-Aware Routing Framework (TARF), SOAR (Simple Opportunistic Adaptive Routing Protocol), Particle Swarm Optimization, and Whale Optimization Algorithm for Secure Routing (PSWOSR). According to the experimental findings, the proposed FOMBC technique achieves high detection, maximum throughput, least latency, and minimum range. The proposed method achieves network lifetime of 4.7%, 5.8%, and 9.87% than the existing TARF, SOAR, and PSWOSR, respectively.

Acoustic signal-based indigenous real-time rainfall monitoring system for sustainable environment

The rainfall weather station employs a tipping bucket rain gauge, which serves as a specialized instrument for the meticulous assessment and documentation of various rainwater parameters. The implementation of a tipping bucket rain gauge for rainfall monitoring bears significant implications for both societal productivity as well as improvement of human life. A noteworthy example can be the constructive influence of rainwater over the sustainable agricultural irrigation practices, wherein the precise monitoring of rainfall through a tipping bucket rain gauge enables the formulation of tedious irrigation strategies. The rainfall monitoring if often handle using rain gauge which majorly faces two challenges named as mechanical devices failure and high installation and maintenance cost. Considering the challenges, we propose the fully automated rain gauge (RG) based on the principle of sound and its properties for rainfall monitoring. The working prototype is part of our work whose primary task is to collect the rainfall acoustic value and store it in the cloud. Our mechanism is to use the acoustic property of rain data to categorize rainfall intensity. We perform blind signal separation on the received signal (acoustic signal recorded with the help of microphone sensor) and feed the separated signal to a recurrent convolution neural network (RCNN). The source separation of the collected acoustic signals is primarily being done using independent component analysis and principal components analysis. The proposed solution can be able to make the classification of rain intensity with more than 80% accuracy. In addition to this, the developed method provides the sustainable solution to the challenges with the low-cost and application-specific acceptable threshold criteria and supplement rain measurement techniques.

Optimal edge-cloud collaboration based strategies for minimizing valid latency of railway environment monitoring system

Response speed is vital for the railway environment monitoring system, especially for the sudden-onset disasters. The edge-cloud collaboration scheme is proved efficient to reduce the latency. However, the data characteristics and communication demand of the tasks in the railway environment monitoring system are all different and changeable, and the latency contribution of each task to the system is discrepant. Hence, two valid latency minimization strategies based on the edge-cloud collaboration scheme is developed in this paper. First, the processing resources are allocated to the tasks based on the priorities, and the tasks are processed parallelly with the allocated resources to minimize the system valid latency. Furthermore, considering the differences in the data volume of the tasks, which will induce the waste of the resources for the tasks finished in advance. Thus, the tasks with similar priorities are graded into the same group, and the serial and parallel processing strategies are performed intra-group and inter-group simultaneously. Compared with the other four strategies in four railway monitoring scenarios, the proposed strategies proved latency efficiency to the high-priority tasks, and the system valid latency is reduced synchronously. The performance of the railway environment monitoring system in security and efficiency will be promoted greatly with the proposed scheme and strategies.

An Analysis on Needs for National Parks by Age Group using Semantic Network Analysis

Background and objective: National parks are places people from all walks of life can utilize. However, many existing studies are limited in suggesting management plans that fit the characteristics of different age groups of people visiting national parks. Therefore, this study aims to identify the requirements for national parks and set the direction for national park services by age group.Methods: This study collected the requirements for national parks from 902 people of different ages through an online self-administered questionnaire and analyzed them through semantic link network analysis.Results: As a result of the analysis, there were management requirements in two areas related to the environment (rubbish and ecological environment, facilities environment such as safety and forest fires) and one area related to the economy, and a monitoring system for rubbish and ecological environment and a private land management policy for the economy were identified as alternatives. The younger generation was interested in environmental issues, the older generation was interested in economic issues, and the elderly was interested in the facilities environment for safety and forest fires. Therefore, it was found that environmental campaigns should be conducted for the younger generation, admission fees and parking rates should be improved for the older generation, and a safe tour environment should be provided for the elderly.Conclusion: The needs analysis found that it is necessary to establish a monitoring system for all national parks from an environmental perspective and improve the management policy about private land from an economic perspective. Furthermore, environmental campaigns and events were required for the younger generation, benefits related to entrance fees for the elderly, and policies to create a safe facilities environment for the elderly. Establishing such national park policies will improve the satisfaction of users.

Drawbacks of Traditional Environmental Monitoring Systems

Traditional methods for evaluating water quality have a number of drawbacks. They need expensive, specialized equipment as well as knowledgeable employees first. Second, data loss may result from human error. Thirdly, because people rather than algorithms will be analyzing the obtained data, these schemes cannot foresee future patterns. Additionally, changes in the characteristics of water may result from the sample transit process. Therefore, it is challenging to consistently check water quality using outdated monitoring techniques. The disadvantages of traditional environmental monitoring techniques have been covered in this study.