Background:
Monitoring the quality of potable water is a challenging endeavor due to the significant sources
of contaminants, the majority of which are human-induced. Limited access to drinking water owing to acceleration in
industrialization, urbanization in consort with growing inhabitants, unprocessed sewage discharge and industrial toxic
effluents causes different life-threatening diseases. Manual water quality monitoring techniques vividly aggravate quality
deterioration. Considering the significance of the automatic water quality monitoring system, we need an in-situ, realtime, continuous surveillance system to ascertain the quality of potable water. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) motivated
us for a practical water quality monitoring system due to their continuous, real-time, and adaptive infrastructure to provide
an early alert in hazardous conditions.
Objective:
To design and implement an online potable water quality monitoring network for rural water supply schemes in
Nagapattinam district, Tamilnadu, India, to sense physiochemical parameters of potable water such as pH, turbidity,
conductivity and temperature.
Methods:
Online POTable water quality monitoring NETwork (POTNET) integrates the reimbursements of WSN and
different information and communication technologies for data acquisition, data processing, and data visualization. The
core hardware of POTNET contains off-the-shelf sensors (i.e., electrodes), a microcontroller, a data transmission system, a
customized buoyage, and a sink node. It senses physiochemical parameters of potable water such as pH, turbidity,
conductivity, and temperature in a pre-programmed time interval. Furthermore, it enables cloud storage for gathered
information and generates an alert to the preregistered user via mobile phones when there is a deviation of quality
measures from threshold values.
Results:
The system was implemented in three overhead tanks for seven days in order to validate the stability of the buoy
and efficiency of energy source, storage, and data transmission. It senses physiochemical parameters of potable water such
as pH, turbidity, conductivity, and temperature in its pre-defined interval of 30 minutes. To check the system accuracy, the
measured data values from developed sensors were compared with the observed data values using a commercial multiparameter water checker, the Horiba® probe. Measured data were sent through the transceivers to the base station for data
logging in a suitable format for ease of data visualization and utilization.
Conclusion:
Extensive experimental results reveal that our POTNET can be employed for potable water quality
surveillance to help consumers or concern authorities to make a sound decision by providing appropriate and real-time
data.
Water quality depends on remineralization’s method in the desalination plant
