Acoustic signature based discrimination of drinking water

This paper deals with the use of acoustic signature for the qualitative analysis of water, where the focus is on the development of ultrasonic based system and its evaluation in terms of discrimination capability. The prototype described in this paper has been designed in the framework of the development of a portable instrument for classification purpose. The common concept for the estimation of quality of water in the various approaches presented in the literature lies in the combination of non-selective sensors for the characterization of water. The fundamental idea of this paper is to investigate how an adequate signal processing approach applied to a mature and affordable acoustic sensor technique can address the issue of extracting aggregate information, which is useful to characterize the water samples. In the proposed approach, dimensionality reduction is performed in a transformed domain via principal component analysis (peA). It is shown that a system based on the proposed acoustic sensor system is able to detect water quality changes.