Developing and improving the electrical system for water quality monitoring system

• Main Author: Hnin, Wai Lynn
• Other Authors: Liu Aiqun
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/69380
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Today, most of the people have been concerning about the quality of water especially drinking water due to rapid environmental changes. If the drinking water is used by the people without knowing there are pathogens such as cryptosporidium and giardia lambia inside the water, a lot of health problems or diseases may be occurred. Therefore, people have been monitoring and detecting the harmful particles inside the drinking water through testing manually in laboratory. However, this kind of water quality monitoring process can be very tedious, much time consuming and requires a lot of manpower. In this project, real-time water quality monitoring system is developed to monitor the quality of drinking water within short amount of time. The system includes circuit boards and electrical components such as valves, pumps, filters, lasers and many others which are controlled through programming. Therefore, electrical system plays one of the important roles to function the whole system. Researching and studying on the electrical circuit system is necessary to be able to understand more about the functions of overall electrical system. In order to make the whole system work smoothly, efficiently and effectively, the problems encountered such as unstable laser background intensity, buffer overflow and VISA timeout error during testing are solved through experiments. The software applications such as LabVIEW as a user interface and MPLAB IDE as a platform to develop code for embedded microcontroller are used to communicate between microcontroller and computer. The communication systems which are used in this project are USB, SPI and I2C. Some improvements on the electrical system of current water quality monitoring system has also been considered by including the LCD controller to display the real-time running status of the system, increasing number of valves and digital input/output pins for the future works. In this project, experiments done and making decisions on solving the problems are based on the experiments’ results, research and studies of the different scholarly articles.