Remote Water Pollution monitoring for Bangalore lakes
Remote Water pollution monitoring
A case study on Bangalore lakes.
Bangalore - City of lakes
Bangalore, officially know as Bengaluru is capital of Indian state of Karnataka and is the third most populated city in India. Bangalore is also know as IT capital of India. Bangalore is also famous for its moderate climate all round the year. Reason for the pleasant weather is that it is situated on the Deccan plateau and surrounded by hills from all side. Large amount of lakes in the city also play a important role for the pleasant weather. Lakes in Bangalore were a rich source of bio-diversity attracting lot of birds from outside to come down during seasonal changes making them again a source of attraction.
Earlier in 1985, there were 51 health lakes(Source : This link ) which were all together a good source of water consumption and they have now reduced to 17. Growing speed of population in Bangalore and encroachment by land builders are some of the main reason's for the reduce number. Along with the reduced number of lakes, earlier their water was used for the daily purpose, but now their water quality has reduced drastically making it not suitable for use.
So we will mainly concentrate on water quality of these lakes and will use our technology of Low power WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) to remotely monitor the quality of water in these lakes and thus would be able to analyze the data to do some analysis and take necessary steps to restore the water quality in the lakes and preserve the bio-diversity around these lakes.
Low powered WSN (Wireless Sensor Network)
WSN (Wireless Sensor network) being a very broad topic cannot be covered here. But for a reference point of view, a easy to explain definition is talking devices with sensor without wire. We will using help of WSN technology in our research and project. Now when we talk about sensor placed in a remote area where availability of electricity is a bit difficult, 2 things come to our mind
Low power consumption mean that device consume lesser power and for this 2 more things need to be considered
Low powered WSN (Wireless Sensor Network)
WSN (Wireless Sensor network) being a very broad topic cannot be covered here. But for a reference point of view, a easy to explain definition is talking devices with sensor without wire. We will using help of WSN technology in our research and project. Now when we talk about sensor placed in a remote area where availability of electricity is a bit difficult, 2 things come to our mind
- Low power consumption.
- Non-Conventional sources of energy.
Low power consumption mean that device consume lesser power and for this 2 more things need to be considered
- Control unit consume/operate at less power - We need to consider a control unit which can operate at 3.3 Volts.
- We make control unit go in sleep mode after doing some work - we will make our control unit go in deep sleep mode for every 30 seconds, then wake up from sleep mode, read sensors, send data and again get to sleep mode. For those who are interested can have a look at this link for more information of sleep modes.
Control unit means, a micro-controller which can do some processing i.e. read some sensor values and send data via some mean to some other device which in our case will be another device having more processing power. Now there can be many queries, why to use micro-controllers when micro-processors with low power mode and high processing speed are available. Reasons are clear, we don't require that processing speed for reading some sensor and we are not doing stuff like parallel processing and neither we are going to add 100 sensors to one micro-controller.
why wireless? and which one?
This is a also a important question, when things can be done much more reliably using wired communication, then why to go with wireless communication? Answer depend on which environment you are trying to implement wireless communication. With sensors in between of lake, floating on tyre tube, it is almost very tough job to draw wires. Although in rainy season or very humid seasons, wireless communication may get affected, but there are always fallback startgey's to deal with those type of conditions, like 2 handshake, 3 way communication, delivery notification etc.
Sensors
Water quality sensor's are one of the most important part of this project. We have to choose them very precisely considering their resolution, effectiveness and costing. We cannot afford sensor's worg lakh's of rupees for a single lake until and unless, its government fund but on the same time, we cannot compromise the quality of sensors. Below are the list of sensor's, i came across and they give out-put in 4-20mA which can be fed to any PLC.
This set-up will be places on a floating tire as illustrated below.
why wireless? and which one?
This is a also a important question, when things can be done much more reliably using wired communication, then why to go with wireless communication? Answer depend on which environment you are trying to implement wireless communication. With sensors in between of lake, floating on tyre tube, it is almost very tough job to draw wires. Although in rainy season or very humid seasons, wireless communication may get affected, but there are always fallback startgey's to deal with those type of conditions, like 2 handshake, 3 way communication, delivery notification etc.
Sensors
Water quality sensor's are one of the most important part of this project. We have to choose them very precisely considering their resolution, effectiveness and costing. We cannot afford sensor's worg lakh's of rupees for a single lake until and unless, its government fund but on the same time, we cannot compromise the quality of sensors. Below are the list of sensor's, i came across and they give out-put in 4-20mA which can be fed to any PLC.
Although some of them give wireless transmission also, but their range is quite limited. And the major problem is whatever range wireless devices provider describe in their "datasheets" differ very much from their real time open environment working range.
Set-up
Water quality remote project have some important parts as
(1) End sensor Nodes.
(2) Central data acquisition node.
(3) Central Server.
End sensor nodes.
End sensor node's or in general wireless water quality sensors will be places on a floating tire, powered by battery and backed up by solar charging at some point in the lake. Similar type of set-up will be placed at 4 different places in same lake and one specifically i an a location which is close to human set-up's. Below pic describe the content of sensor node to be placed in the lake.
Data transfer between end sensor node and central data acquisition unit will happen like this
Central data Acquisition node
CDA node need to posses high processing power as it will keep on receiving data from each end sensor node after every 15 second or 10 second or even 5 second which is customizable. Reason for making this data sensing time as small as possible is to see the change in water quality during rainy season. CDA will store data in a TS(Time-series database) and after every 5 minute or 3 minute will post data to our central server.
A example set-up will be as depicted in below pic. In this pic, i had considered Madiwala lake. Sensors will be placed at different places in the lakes and CDA will be placed in a reachable place. CDA will also be powered with battery and backed by Solar-power. This will make our project run independent of any power supply.
Central Server
Central Server will be running Yuktix Cloud app. Yuktix Cloud app is able to receive, display and archive data send from a device. Yuktix cloud app provide a efficient way to manage your devices like making some devices go under one project name, display there location on map or all devices together. Yuktix cloud app also keep data in archive, from where it can be downloaded in future for research and analysis.
Similarly, we can send end sensor node i.e. water quality sensor data to CDA and from CDA to Yuktix central server where it can visualized. Below is set-up explanation with a picture.
With this kind of set-up, one can easily monitor water quality of the lakes form any remote location, with any requirement of visiting the lakes personally and what ever time one save, can invest the same time in doing more in-depth research. Water has always played a important role in everyone life and with this growing population of banaglore, lakes water have been diluted to a extent that now it's not usable for daily purpose. With this effective technique of remote monitoring, water quality can be monitored and same data can be accessed by local NGO's or any individual to ask government to take necessary action. With this, biodiversity existing in the lake or near-by area can be saved.
Lets together make Bangalore a clean city.
People who are interested in doing this project or even funding it can contact us at
Email Id : Support@yuktix.com
Shahilendra@yuktix.com
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