Automation and monitoring of reverse osmosis water treatment plant

Abstract

The world is suffering from an eminent water crisis. Safe and pure drinking water is the necessity and right of everyone. The use of reverse osmosis-based water treatment plants has become a common method for providing clean water in many areas as the global demand for water increases. Automation and monitoring is an important task for such plants at remote distance. A system is needed to prevent difficulties when one needs to control and monitor important parameters such as Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), Water Level, Flow rate manually. Manually operated RO plants have failed due to lack of proper monitoring and maintenance. Designed system in this article is equipped with Arduino microcontroller which controls the operation of system, water level sensors for water level monitoring in particular tank, water flow sensors to measure the flow rate of water during run, pH sensor for product water quality monitoring and a wireless connectivity module, which is used to establish communication between user/operator and the RO system at remote areas. The system not only allows user to monitor the important parameters of RO plant which influence the performance, but also allow to control the plant at remote distance. The system gives the measurement report upon a request message and also alerts the user automatically if any critical situation occurs at plant site. The system can be placed at any location where GSM based wireless connectivity is available and can be controlled from a single location.