Our project is measuring the varying characteristics of water in order to define the quality and pollution rate of water.

The water-land proportion is 89 %. More than 14000 people per year die caused by water pollution. Water pollution is gradually increasing while the water quantity is decreasing.

That is the main reason encouraging us to come up with this project.

Our project aims at:

-       Cheap and automatic measurement of the characteristic parameters such as temperature, conductivity, salt and phosphate rate without the necessity of expensive machines and a professional laboratory.

-          Improvement of the current methods used for the measurement of these parameters and usage of new methods for our purposes.

-          Fast, cheap, automatic and mobile measurement.

-          Development of the model in order to use the model in lakes and rivers (sweet waters).

Considering the experiments, data and graphics we made, we proved that the aimed parameters could be measured fast, cheap, mobile and automatic with small basic sensors without the help of any academician or professional laboratories. The parameters, we focused on, are temperature, conductivity, salinity and phosphate rate of water. We didn’t use the normal method for measuring conductivity. We rather used another method, which is being researched by some universities in Germany. This method is based on magnetic and electric fields. Since all our measurements are digital, our accuracy is ± 0,01V (2%)

We found out that our results were right regarding the accuracy in the temperature (equivalent to 0,01V per 1°C). The temperature could be measured between -55°C and +155°C.

The relation between the voltage measured in our experiments and molarities are as the following: The graphics obtained from the salty water of the molarities between 0,9-0,1 and 0,09-0,01 are linear. As the temperature affects the measurements, we took our measurements on the same day at room temperature. The conductivity could be measured according to the salinity rates between 58,44 g/l and 0,5844 g/l.

The voltage-Phosphate diagram obtained from the phosphate measurements is linear. We transferred the function of the graph to our microprocessor (input voltage range 0.5volts; steps 255) and succeeded in automatic measuring. The quantity of phosphate could be measured between 0,5 mg/l and 5,5 mg/l.

The salinity could be defined by putting the total salinity rate obtained from the conductivity measurement to the following accepted model. The average quantities of different salt kinds could also be determined this way: 55% Chloride, 30,6 % Sodium, 7,7 % Sulfate, 3,7 % Magnesium, 1,2 % Calcium, 1,1 % Potassium, 0,7 % minor constituents.

The overall cost of our project is approximately US$100.

We believe that various water institutes would be able to do their analysis cheaper and more easily due to the improvement reached by our project: Besides, the sectors and the industrial institutions interested in water could also benefit from the data we measured. By measuring the oxygen and phosphate rate in water, the quality of water could be determined and deaths caused by water pollution could be prevented.