Abstract
Water pollution is one of the most serious ecological threats we face today. Each water body is affected by some organic, inorganic or radioactive pollutant, coming from direct or indirect sources. Surface water and ground water must currently be monitored in all countries on a very large scale by public authorities, but also private companies, to enforce pollution reduction and environmental law compliance. Most of the controls are performed by manually sampling the waters and by sending the samples to an authorized laboratory for the analysis, with high costs, long response times, low sampling frequency and consequent low monitoring data resolution.
The research aims to develop methods and to design a device able to perform the sampling, preparation and detecting automatically. The proposed system in fact can be easily installed on site and, once configured and positioned, smart sensors can send analytical data directly to the customer with no human intervention. It involves no costs for sampling activities, response times reduced to few minutes and the possibility to achieve high sampling frequency and a consequent strict monitoring of the evolution of the site status. Moreover, the device will be able to collect and share data, according to IoT technology.