Design of a virtual instrument for water quality monitoring across the Internet

This article presents the design of a new distributed and multi-platform system for water quality monitoring, enhanced with powerful Internet capabilities. The measured variables are temperature, turbidity, pH, dissolved oxygen, and electrical conductivity. The signal-conditioning block has been simplified through the use of software routines for thermal compensation, hence, reducing the cost and dimensions. The system offers a wide variety of Internet capabilities, like e-mail alarm notifications, automatic storage of measured data in a remote machine via the FTP protocol, dynamic generation of HTML reports, real time graphs, and indicators visible from a remote web browser, etc. The whole system supports several types of computers, operating systems and communications hardware. Human presence near the geographic location of water is dramatically reduced, since the system automates the principal tasks of the classical water monitoring process.