Proof of Concept Study of an Electrochemical Sensor for Inland Water Monitoring with a Network Approach

Abstract

The technologies most suitable for monitoring the ecosystem of inland waters are image spectrometry and electrochemical sensors. The reason is that these instruments are able to ensure accuracy in the surveillance of very large areas through reliable and frequent measurements performed remotely. Electrochemical systems provide low-cost, miniaturized, reliable sensors that can be organized, when equipped with commercial on the shelf (COTS) low-power radio components implementing LoRaWAN, Sigfox or NB-IoT communications, in a dense network of sensors achieving the aforementioned requirements. In this work, a low-cost, low-size and low-noise electrochemical sensor endowed with protocols for network configuration, management and monitoring is presented. The electronic interface of the sensor allows high reproducible responses. As proof of concept for its utilization in inland water monitoring, the device has been tested for water composition analysis, bacteria identification and frequent pollutant detection: atrazine, dichloromethane and tetrachloroethene. The results are promising, and future investigations will be oriented to unlock the true potential of a general-purpose approach exploiting the continuous fusion of distributed data in each of the three considered application scenarios. A new device, with reduced power consumption and size, has been also developed and tested; this new device should be a node of a large network for inland water monitoring.