Background:
From harbours to fisheries, from Marine reserves to rivers and inland waterways, water quality monitoring is essential to determine the health of waters. Water is essential to life on Earth. Water covers 71 percent of the planet: our oceans, rivers, lakes, ice caps and glaciers; It's water in the soil, or even water vapor in the air. Without water, life could not exist at all. However, our water quality is under threat: not just for drinking water, but also for the water that flows through our oceans to support Marine life, fisheries and aquaculture, as well as for coastal communities around ports, where stormwater flows are a major problem. Poor national land management, irrigation practices, waste disposal practices and increased chemical concentrations are all factors that affect groundwater quality, leading to pollution similar to chemical threats. We can use water quality monitoring equipment for online monitoring.
Significance of Water quality monitoring
Levels of water pollution pose a threat to our health and the environment. Poor water quality (e.g. dissolved oxygen in water, preferably higher than 6.5-8 mg/l) and water pollution pose a threat to businesses that rely on high water quality standards to ensure the health of fish and mollusks. For people living in coastal communities, the impact on water quality and water health is obvious and needs to be protected from negative effects. For Marine protected areas (MPA), maintaining water quality is critical to protecting Marine biodiversity and other vital ecosystem services in Marine and coastal areas. Wastewater treatment centres have important responsibilities in collecting and treating water, identifying potential contaminants, protecting human health, and providing and identifying resources that can help improve water quality.
How has water quality traditionally been monitored?
Traditionally, water quality monitoring has relied on artificial systems for data collection and sampling. Sensors are placed at sites to record data, and samples are collected from each site and sent to a laboratory for analysis. This is time consuming, expensive and inefficient, creating difficult conditions for comparing or evaluating various water quality parameters.
Water Ion Sensor-Water Ion Monitoring
Ion sensor is a sensor that uses ion selective electrode to convert the amount of ions felt into usable output signal. Ion sensor is a selective measurement of the concentration (activity) of specific ions in solution. It has been 20 years since its development and plays an extremely important role in all scientific fields. In recent years, due to the development of semiconductor integration technology, ion sensors are also moving towards the direction of diversification and intelligent telemetry.