Water quality monitoring drone

Abstract

Water, a vital substance on earth, and all living things depend on it. This makes it very important to thequality of all life forms on earth. This project intends to focus on researching a cheaper and easy meansto help make it easier for water quality sampling and monitoring to be done efficiently and withaccuracy as this is a significant part of living things, we need to develop ways to monitor it efficiently.A lot of practices and processes are involved in water quality testing, and this contributes to most of theinaccuracies in test results. To prevent this and minimizing the process, other way needs to be adoptedto cut down the time involved and avoid inaccuracies.With the many testing processes available and, with its challenges. Technicians may spend dayscollecting and running tests on samples of water collected, this causes an increase in the spatial timeaffecting the results. The author is focus on researching ways to better solve this problem.Getting to hard areas to collect samples of water by technicians for test in the Lab takes a lot of effortand some are impossible to access. Swamps and marsh can also present a challenge.This research work is to develop and implement a drone system which is designed with a "minilaboratory" which houses sensors needed such as PH sensor, temperature sensor, turbidity sensor, infraredcamera, and dissolved oxygen concentration sensor. These sensors will make up the "minilaboratory" of the drone for analysing and monitoring the water by using the Arduino as the brain toallow inserting the test devices into the water while hovering to collect data, it can also float on thewater to save battery life and transmit the test results to a mobile device accessed by the user.It will analyse the water temperature, the PH level of the water, the Oxygen concentration, turbidity andprocess the data collected from water test, send results to the user. This can be done by one personcontrolling the drone remotely while the data collected by the drone is sent via GSM network to amobile device in the form of a SMS.The drone will also be equipped with an infrared camera which takes aerial photography in infra-red ofthe water surface to help identify contaminant and it saves the image on an SD card which can beretrieved by the user.There are many challenges involved in such method, of which the author has not ignored during thisresearch work. Some of the challenges to be overcome include weather conditions, battery capacity,drone reliability, GSM signal and accuracy of test results.During the research work, all undocumented problems that may arise will be noted and recorded to helpbetter the system in the near future. As previously stated, the idea is to reduce cost and save timeinvolved in collecting the data and the results availability. This will allow more effective monitoring ofa wider range of water resources; it will also give lab technicians the opportunity to access acute areasthat are inaccessible and dangerous. All data collected by the drone is used to analyse the quality of thewater and can be used to monitor water over a period of time to study the contaminant flow and effectof climate change on the water body over a period of time.This system will undergo an extensive testing procedure and usage, the time frame for the project isshort hence, it will be handled according to the duration involved and every step will be noted down forfuture continuation, upgrade or improvement making the system much better and reliable as it may notbe fully completed as the author might have plan to due to the time.

Date of Award	Jan 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bedfordshire
Supervisor	Tahmina Ajmal (Supervisor) & Dayou Li (Second supervisor)