Water Quality Monitoring System In The South Sudan

Abstract

Water pollution has become a very serious matter for the global health organizations, a report by World Health Organization indicates that, over Nine Million people worldwide die from diarrheal diseases such as cholera and dysentery yearly. Where in South Sudan about five to ten people become ill daily because of drinking contaminated water caused by poor drainage system in the country. The system proposed in this document will use ZigBee technology for real-time monitoring of water quality at low cost and low energy consumption. The system will consist of wireless Sensors Network with several sensors nodes which are capable of detecting polluted water with the help of network and some parameters, these include Temperature, pH, and Turbidity which will be used to capture some values, and the authorize person then receive a notification about the water quality in the Tank.

Introduction

Due to the current development of the economy, there have been serious matters arising in the environment. Water pollution is one of the problems facing the world's population. Because water is considered one of the most important needs of human well-being and socio-economic development of the country. Water is not only a vital drink for life and living organisms, but also vitally industrial and agricultural. The total amount of water remains on the planet all the time and meets all the requirements of civilization, but drinking water is rapidly threatening the world. The impact of increased pesticide waste, populations, undetected wastewater, climate change, and other human activities on waterways will certainly affect densely populated areas if they are not treated effectively. To add on that, water is not evenly spread throughout the planet so non- uniform, unsustainable and inequitable allocation results in problem of scarcity and availability.

In some parts worldwide, people use contaminated water tainted with disease and vectors for usage in drinking and cooking because of scarce access to potable water.

In this paper, I choose Republic of South Sudan as a test case because as we know that, it is still among the low developed countries and growing economy of the developing world in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth but as if this is not enough, the Republic of South Sudan face many challenges like the access to clean water by the public as it finds its way to economic wellbeing due to rapid increase in population growth.

To address this issue of water pollution, there has been some parameters that were identified to be used in the measuring of the water quality. This includes the Temperature, PH, Turbidity, and so on.

These parameters help to monitor the quality of water which will be used for the public consumption. Monitoring means the collection of information at a set location and at regular intervals in order to provide data which may be used to define current conditions, establish trends. Traditional water quality monitoring Technique involves sampling and laboratory techniques; however, these methods are time consuming (leading to delayed detection and response to contaminants) and not cost effective. Hence, there is need for more extensive and efficient monitoring methods.

Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network (WSN): Simply refers to a group of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors for monitoring and recording the physical conditions of the environment and organizing the collected data at a central location. Wireless Sensor Networks measure environmental conditions like temperature, sound, pollution levels, humidity, wind, and so on.

The WSN is built of 'nodes' – from a few to several hundreds or even thousands, where each node is connected to one (or sometimes several) sensors. Each such sensor network node has typically several parts: a radio transceiver with an internal antenna or connection to an external antenna, a microcontroller, an electronic circuit for interfacing with the sensors, and an energy source, usually a battery or an embedded form of energy harvesting.

Sensor

A sensor gives a corresponding electrical data by discovering the events or modifications in its environment. A sensor is a transducer device. The Performance of the sensor is increased by the sensor calibration. Speed, accuracy, resolution, and linearity are the most important quality of the sensor. The activities can be enhanced and removing of errors due to frame are deleted in the sensor results which makes it enhance. The difference between the wanted output, and the obtained output of the sensor makes way to identify the mistakes due to structure.

Related Work

In this section, a number of studies including the implementation of water quality monitoring systems using wireless sensors network are discussed below.

According to Jayti Bhatt, Jignesh Patoliya entitled “Real Time Water Quality Monitoring System”. his paper describes to ensure the safe supply of drinking water the quality should be monitored in real time for that purpose new approach IOT (Internet of Things) based water quality monitoring has been proposed. In this paper, we present the design of IOT based water quality monitoring system that monitor the quality of water in real time. This system consists some sensors which measure the water quality parameter such as pH, turbidity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, and temperature. The measured values from the sensors are processed by microcontroller and these processed values are transmitted remotely to the core controller that is raspberry pi using ZigBee protocol. Finally, sensors data can view on internet browser application using cloud computing.

According to M. N. Barabde, in 2016 the System is used for determining the physiochemical factors of water quality such as motion, temperature, PH, conductivity, and oxidation lowering potential using ZigBee.

According to Satish Turken, Amruta Kulkarni in 2011, “Solar Powered Water Quality Monitoring System using Wireless Sensor Network”, The Base station (BS) gathered information from distant remote sensors. The BS associated with ZigBee module was powered by sunlight baseboard (Energy harvesting).

A ZigBee based WSN water quality monitoring and measurement system enables remote probing and real-time monitoring of the water quality parameters and enables observation of current and historical water quality status.

According to Zhanwei Sun, Chi Harold Li, Chatschik Bisdikian, Joel W. Branch and Bo Yang entitled “QOI-Aware Energy Management in Internet-of-Things Sensory Environments”. In this paper an efficient energy management frame work to provide satisfactory QOI experience in IOT sensory environments is studied. Contrary to past efforts, it is transparent and compatible to lower protocols in use, and preserving energy-efficiency in the long run without sacrificing any attained QOI levels. Specifically, the new concept of QOI-aware “sensor-to-task relevancy” to explicitly consider the sensing capabilities offered by a sensor to the IOT sensory environments, and QOI requirements required by a task. A novel concept of the “critical covering set” of any given task in selecting the sensors to service a task over time. Energy management decision is made dynamically at runtime, as the optimum for long-term traffic statistics under the constraint of the service delay. Finally, an extensive case study based on utilizing the sensor networks to perform water level monitoring is given to demonstrate the ideas and algorithms proposed in this paper, and a simulation is made to show the performance of the proposed algorithms.

Proposed System

Water quality monitoring system proposed in this paper involves building a smart water monitoring system with the help of pH Sensor for measuring the acidity and the alkalinity, Turbidity Sensor for measuring the Transparency of the water, Temperature Sensor for measuring the Hotness and coldness of the water, and the Ultrasonic Sensor for sensing water level left in the Tank. when all these Sensors reads a value, the results are compared with that of the threshold value, and then a push notification is sent to the Admin through SMS.

System Architecture

The model of my proposed water quality monitoring system is shown by the system architecture below. This representation of the system gives a clear understanding of how the system is being architecture. It consists of these parameters; PH Sensor, Turbidity sensor, Temperature Sensor, Ultrasonic Sensor, Arduino Uno, and the ZigBee Technology.

pH Sensor

The PH Sensor will measure the acidity or alkalinity of the water. The PH scale range is from 0-14 with a Neutral point being 7 when the value is above 7, that indicates that the solution (water) is a basic or alkaline solution and when value is below 7, this will indicate that the solution (water) is an acidic solution. The normal range of PH for the drinking water is from 6.5 to 8.5.

Turbidity Sensor

This is the measure of the cloudiness of water. The cloudiness is caused by suspended solid and microscopic plants and animals that are suspended in the water column. Turbidity indicates the degree at which water loses its transparency. It is considered as a good measure of water quality. Turbidity blocks out the light needed by submerged aquatic vegetation. It can also raise surface water temperature above normal because suspended particles near the surface facilitate the absorption of heat from the sunlight. The normal turbidity level should not exceed 5 NTU (Nephelometric Turbidity Unit).

Temperature Sensor

To measure the coldness and hotness of the water, the temperature sensor is a 1- wire digital temperature sensor. That means one can read the temperature with a very simple circuit setup, which is good to be in Arduino. The temperature range is -55 to +125ºϹ. This temperature sensor gives accurate reading.

Ultrasonic Sensor

Ultrasonic sensor has two openings, one is Trigger and the other is Echo. Trigger makes high frequency sound waves. These sound waves are passed through the tank from top to bottom. The sound waves hit the water and are reflected back in the form of Echo waves. The Echo opening receives the Echo waves. The water level sensor in the Arduino measures the time between Echo and Trigger. This traveled distance is directly proportional to the time.

Arduino Uno

Arduino is a microcontroller board on the AT mega 328P. It has 14 digital input/output pins (6 of which can be used as PWM output), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz quartz crystal, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller. Arduino, now evolved to newer releases. The Uno board is the first in series of USB Arduino boards, past or outdated boards see the Arduino index of boards which is connected to power supply.

Zigbee Technology

As per wireless communication is concerned, the information from these sensors are related wirelessly to a notification node and here with my technology of using ZigBee which is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and can reach 250 Kbps data rate with a distance of 10m to 70m. Although the data rate for ZigBee is less than 11 Mbps data rate for WiFi, it’s adequate for my proposal. One of the interesting advantages of the ZigBee in the specification modules are the low power consumption and little to no infrastructure requirements which is not the case with Wifi which is based on the IEEE 802.11 specification.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages:

• Implementation of organization.
• Provide real time water content data.
• Minimizes the need for battery replacement because of the low power consumption.
• Reduces maintenance by ensuring high reliability.

Disadvantage: There is a real need for the funding agencies to establish collaborative research effort on the development in the Sensor Technology.

The Design of the System

The six main modules comprising my system are:

1. Admin Module.
2. Sensing the level Module.
3. Sensing the acidity and alkalinity Module.
4. Sensing the Hotness and Coldness Module.
5. Sensing the Transparency Module.
6. Notification Module.

Implementation Details

The flow chart below represents the entire process of my system where it starts with the sensors being connected to the water inside the tank, and the various sensors take records. Example the Ultrasonic sensor checks the water level, the pH sensor checks the acidity and the alkalinity of the water, the Turbidity sensor checks the cloudiness of the water and finally the Temperature sensor checks the hotness and the coldness of the water. All the sensors after checking the condition of the water they then send various signals to the Arduino Uno or Microcontroller. The Arduino Uno then forward the data to the database using the zigbee where information is sent as a push notification to the Admin’s Phone.

The Implementation Details are:

• Database is created for storing the recorded data.
• The data from the sensors is transferred to Arduino Uno when it detects a change in the water condition.
• Data from the Arduino is sent to the Database.
• The Admin receive notification for various causes.
• If no notification is received for many days, then the sensor might have been damaged.

The Algorithm

The system here implements the following:

1. The Hardware is connected to power.
2. The various sensors then measure the water condition at every interval in the tank.
3. The Arduino Uno microcontroller sends notification to the Admin.

Conclusion

My study presented the design stage of water quality monitoring system in water tank using the Arduino Uno and the four Modules pH sensor, Temperature sensor, Ultrasonic sensor, and Turbidity sensor. As per the requirements’ analysis and the system design details it has indicated that, the entire system can be built with low cost, reliable instruments which provide an efficient water quality monitoring in the water tank.

Reference

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