Development of a conductivity sensor powered using solar energy for the remote monitoring of water quality

• Main Author: Neo, Hui Min
• Other Authors: Rusli
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/74910
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With research, it has been learnt that water quality is vital to an ecosystem and each ecosystem has its healthy range of conductivity levels to maintain its water quality. In order to continuously monitor the water quality in an ecosystem, this project works on building a self-sustaining system which harnesses energy from the sun and utilises the flow of data in info-communication technology. Sunlight, a renewable energy, enables the system to be constantly powered up. Storing this energy into a battery, the system fulfils its objective of being autonomous. In the 21st century, flow of data is phenomenal in which it empowers devices to connect and transmit data wirelessly. This, is termed the Internet of Things (IoT). With today’s solar technology and IoT, an autonomous IoT system is designed. The system first harnesses solar energy from the sun and stores it into a battery for use throughout the day. It connects to a conductivity sensor for conductivity readings to monitor the water quality. Through the IoT, Arduino MKR1000 transmits these conductivity readings to a cloud storage, ThingSpeak. Thus, the system is built to be autonomous and self-sustaining with the advantage in obtaining and monitoring real-time conductivity readings. Following this report, the theory behind the solar cell, technical components and its specifications will be studied before building the autonomous IoT system.