Minimally invasive online water monitor

Abstract

Sensor installation on water infrastructure is challenging due to requirements for service interruption, specialised personnel, regulations and reliability as well as the resultant high costs. Here, a minimally invasive installation method is introduced based on hot-tapping and immersion of a sensor probe. A modular architecture is developed that enables the use of interchangeable multi-sensor probes, non-specialist installation and servicing, low-power operation and configurable sensing and connectivity. A prototype implementation with a temperature, pressure, conductivity and flow multi-sensor probe is presented and tested on an evaluation rig. This paper demonstrates simple installation, reliable and accurate sensing capability as well as remote data acquisition. The demonstrated minimally invasive multi-sensor probes provide an opportunity for the deployment of water quality sensors that typically require immersion such as pH and spectroscopic composition analysis. This design allows dynamic deployment on existing water infrastructure with expandable sensing capability and minimal interruption, which can be key to addressing important sensing parameters such as optimal sensor network density and topology.