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TEKNOKONVERGENS-Teknologikonvergens - grensesprengende forskning og radikal innovasjon

Hybrid Sensors for Safe Drinking Water

Alternative title: Hybridsensorer for trygt drikkevann

Awarded: NOK 4.4 mill.

Doscon envisions a radical change in the way we monitor drinking water quality to protect consumer health from adverse effects of newly regulated chemical contaminants – Prohibited Organic Compounds (POCs). Water and wastewater treatment plants in Norway and EU will need to monitor POCs in accordance with the EU Directives regulating POCs. Methods available today are very costly and delivered through extremely expensive equipment in commercial laboratories. Because of these inhibiting costs, utilities cannot afford to monitor the POCs as often as they want. External commercial laboratories use several days to deliver offsite results, which disables the opportunity to immediately optimise the treatment processes. However, real-time sensors can provide this possibility, but there are no such sensors for POCs in the market at present. DOSCON has a concept for several hard-to-measure parameters in wastewater using virtual sensors. The ambition of this project is to develop a dedicated physical probe for POCs, based on the latest Data Science tools and real-time measurements from a few simple physical probes. The results will be accessible on various platforms (smart phones to large screens) via a state-of-the-art online analytics platform (DosMon) that presents real-time estimates of POCs in a responsive dashboard. Hybrid Sensors will provide opportunities to monitor drinking water quality in real-time to prevent negative health impacts on consumers. They can improve the treatment quality by process optimisation and enable Early Warning Systems to prevent and reduce threats to human health. The proposed development will solve the problems of real-time monitoring of critically important water quality parameters. It will also address the challenge of monitoring organic contaminants highlighted in recently updated regional/national regulations and watch-lists.

Doscon envisions a radical change in the way we monitor the quality of drinking water to protect the health of consumers from adverse effects of newly regulated chemical contaminants – Prohibited Organic Compounds (POCs). Water and wastewater treatment plants in Norway and EU will need to monitor the POCs following the EU Directives. However, there are neither real-time nor near-real-time means for monitoring POCs. Soft sensing (virtual sensing) is a concept developed by Doscon for hard-to-measure parameters of wastewater. We consider Doscon’s successful experience with soft sensing of COD and N/P-compounds in water as a strong reference that can be used to develop a solution for monitoring of POCs. The innovative concept of Hybrid Sensors combines a new multidimensional triple spectral probe (MultiSpec), existing simple inexpensive probes and novel Water Soft Sensors. These merge through sensor fusion into a state-of-the-art online analytics platform (DosMon) that presents real-time estimates of POCs in a responsive dashboard. Standalone Hybrid Sensors proposed for development by Doscon will enable an automated, low-cost & low-maintenance real-time quantification of chemical pollutants in water and wastewater through a combination of direct measurements and soft sensing with advanced data analytics. Hybrid Sensors will provide opportunities to monitor water quality in real-time preventing negative health and environmental effects. They can improve the treatment quality by process optimisation and enable Early Warning Systems to prevent and reduce threats to human and environmental health. The proposed development will solve the problems of real-time monitoring of critically important water quality parameters. It will also address the challenge of monitoring organic contaminants highlighted in recently updated regional/national regulations and watch-lists.

Funding scheme:

TEKNOKONVERGENS-Teknologikonvergens - grensesprengende forskning og radikal innovasjon

Funding Sources