Design of smart sensors for real time drinking water quality monitoring and contamination detection in water distributed mains

Abstract

Drinking Water Distribution Systems facilitate to carry portable water from water resources such as reservoirs, river, and water tanks to industrial, commercial and residential consumers through complex buried pipe networks. Determining the consequences of a water contamination event is an important concern in the field of water systems security and in drinking water distribution systems. The proposed work is based on the development of low cost fuzzy based water quality monitoring system using wireless sensor networks which is capable of measuring physiochemical parameters of water quality such as pH, temperature, conductivity, oxidation reduction potential and turbidity. Based on selected parameters a sensing unit is developed along with several microsystems for analog signal conditioning, data aggregation, sensor data analysis and logging, and remote representation of data to the consumers. Finally, algorithms for fusing the real time data and decision making using fuzzy logic at local level are developed to assess the water contamination risk. Based on the water contamination level in the distribution pipeline the drinking water quality is classified as acceptable/reject/desirable. When the contamination is detected, the sensing unit with ZigBee sends signals to close the solenoid valve inside the pipeline to prevent the flow of contaminated water supply and it intimates the consumers about drinking water quality through mobile app. Experimental results indicate that this low cost real time water quality monitoring system acts as an ideal early warning system with best detection accuracy. The derived solution can also be applied to different IoT (Internet of Things) scenario such as smart cities, the city transport system etc.