A portable system for estimation of chemical oxygen demand in wastewater using ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy

In this paper, the development of a portable system to perform real-time analysis of waste water is presented. This developed system can significantly determine the degree of water pollution by organic material by measuring Chemical oxygen demand. The system uses ultraviolet and visible light spectrum to correlate the absorbance of light in the chemical content of wastewater, which is used to estimate the amount of chemical oxygen demand in wastewater. The key feature of this system is the developed algorithm, which can automatically detect the most sensitive spectral region and wavelength for chemical oxygen demand content by performing statistical analysis on acquired spectra from spectrometer. The development and validation of this spectroscopic tool and software system are described here.