Monitor water pollutants remotely
15 Jan 2000
John Hubble's team has developed a novel sensor technique to monitor water quality economically in the field.
Yorkshire Water and Anglian Water have both expressed interest in the technique, which could form the basis of an alarm system to warn of threats to drinking water.
Potential pollutants such as hydrocarbons, aromatics and herbicides are adsorbed onto a solid support within the device. A heat pulse partially desorbs the material and the resulting temperature pulse is monitored by a thermistor. Desorption of the pollutant causes attenuation of the thermal signal which is interpreted with a so-called trained neural network.
Hubble's team has obtained results for the adsorption of phenol and phenoxy acid herbicides onto a packed bed of granular activated carbon (GAC).
Long contact time adsorbers are needed to meet the latest EU Directives on the removal of pesticides from water supplies sourced in rivers and boreholes. In related work, H&G Process Contracting, of Croydon, and Anglian Water, have jointly developed several new designs of the GAC adsorbers.
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