PRE2022 3 Group7/weekbyweek

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Week 1

Initial design concepts and their respective links

Final design subject

Swarm of Intelligent buoys that are able to sense its surroundings and deliver data based on this

Users

The target group of our device would be people who live close to either oceans or rivers, or areas where it is known that floods are prone to occur. Although The Netherlands is excellent protected against the ocean, it is still below sea level, making it a dangerous area if floods were to occur.

Therefore, everyone listed above will benefit from having something installed that could reliably warn about incoming floods. However, even if you don’t live in one of the mentioned areas, you can still benefit. This is because floods can cause major damage to the economy of a country, making it generally harder for others, or other surrounding countries as well.

To summarise, the most important stakeholders include:

  • The general public: benefits from the increased protection
  • The government: Increased chance of economy stability
  • Investors: Due to implementation, they get higher returns (or something, I'm not an investor). They may also have some say in the development process.
  • Inventors/designers: Can sell patents for money, or design further. They also directly control how it operates.

State of the art

Water quality checks, focussed on sensors:

  1. Review of sensors to monitor water quality: https://erncip-project.jrc.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/Review_of_sensors_to_monitor_water_%20quality.pdf - Gives a list of water quality monitoring probes, and the paper gives details on the specification of the sensors and their price. Addtionally, it gives other insights to water monitorization. The basic monitorization across all sites includes water’s flow rate, turbidity, pH, temperature, conductivity and pressure. Depending on the need chlorine, fluoride, nitrate, particle count or total organic carbon are also monitored in some places. The list of sensors and the description of functionality:
    1. fluorescence-dissolved organic matter (FDOM) sensor, ->dissolved organic carbon (DOC), trihalomethane (THM),  methyl mercury (MeHg)
    2. The KaptaTM 3000 AC4 (3600 euro), free chlorine, pressure, temperature and conductivity
    3. Spectro::lyser™ (12 000 euro) TSS, turbidity, NO3-N, COD, BOD, TOC, DOC, UV254, colour, BTX, O3, H2S, AOC, fingerprints and spectral-alarms, temperature and pressure
    4. The i::scan (4000 euro) colour, UV254, organics (TOC, DOC, COD, BOD), turbidity and UV-V
    5. EventLab (14000 euro)
    6. Lab-on-Chip ()
    7. The Algae Toximeter (30000 euro)
    8. COLIGUARD® (50000 euro)
  2. The estimated price of the signle purpose sensors, with possibly worse specifications.
    • Flow rate: (+20 euro)
    • Turbidity sensor: (+- 25 euro)
    • pH: (+25 euro)
    • Temperature (+- 10 euro)
    • Conductivity (+ 120 euro)
    • Pressure (+30 euro)

Swarm of robots:

  1. A Review of Studies in Swarm Robotics: https://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3571&context=elektrik
    • Inspiration comes from social insects
    • Three main characteristics robustness, flexibility and scalability
    • categorising :  aware and unaware, aware can be further divided to strongly-coordinated,weakly-coordinated and not-coordinated
    • Different way to model the robots:
      • Sensor-Based, individual are as simple as possible, and focus on scalability
      • Microscopic, model each robot and their interactions mathematically
      • Marcoscopic, model the whole system
      • Cellular Automata Modeling, not really relevant to our project
    • Behaviour design
      • Adaptive: Nonadaptive> subsumption, probabilistic finite state automata, distributed potential field methods and neural networks (“Virtual pheromones”, “embedded computation”)
      • Learning minimum power topology problem Local / Global Reinforcement
      • Evolution
    • Communication (ideally should be based on broadcasting instead of using the name and address to refer individual)
      • Use the environment
      • Direct communication with others
      • Interaction via sensing / communication
        • The difference lies on if there are explicit communication between the robot
  2. Reflections on the future of swarm robotics: https://hal.science/hal-03362864/document -

Detecting micro plastics, focussing on the chemistry part:

  1. Methods for sampling and detection of microplastics in water and sediment: A critical review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165993618305247 - Plastics smaller than 5mm can be considered as microplastics. It is potentially harmful to organisms or ecosystems. The distribution of the microplastics varies depending on various factors, the simple location and depth make a significant difference. The Mesh size also can have large influence on concentrations reported. The most common way to separate microplastic and the samples are filtration, sieving, flotation and elutriation.

Generating energy:

  1. Tidal current power generation: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40722-016-0044-8 + https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/030142159190049T - There are different types of tidal current generators: turbines (multiple types), kites and hydrofoils. Out of these 3, turbines are the easiest to understand, however, they either require too much space (axial-flow), or don’t generate enough reliable power (cross-flow). Furthermore, the materials could get damaged by prolonged contact with water, reducing the lifespan of anything operating in the water.
  2. Wave energy generation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032115003925?casa_token=CVv0TFwNB7EAAAAA:4Y-xywxZlAy8BZ6r8pWrPb8Awjj4AhK5sI4MiIz0dBDEToEbmcoQwQ-DvR6aurkkL3MSNqI67k4M + https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4974496  - Either linear or radial generation. For us, linear would be the better option as it requires less space (but is, of course, less efficient). This generation would be done by means of moving multiple permanent magnets around, creating a moving magnetic field, inducing a flux through a coil, which in turn produces current. This method will, however, only work when waves are high enough, and may, therefore, not produce enough power for whatever we may want to install inside our aperatus.
  3. Solar power generation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214785318312665 - may be possible, however, it would mean that there is a large possibility that the device would not be active for large periods of time. Further, life spans of PV cells are not extremely long, and are easily damaged, making it not the best solution for ocean power generation.
  4. Triboelectric nanogenerators: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211285519304628?casa_token=2Tpy27NOQPAAAAAA:ujdMrGEREH3dbh4gfeWgOvj3Wj5Br3X2cEBS-_Dg5jG00sTSDGgrxvZkc4G2e98LYs_pvBX90yVT + https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211285514002353?casa_token=Ow53wafsXIkAAAAA:D4sDZMP-x4ull8nveIxces-zSmaTDom9e4ERPpAaqBPiYtD4OT14B4j5SPJdqJKm6GjanENsUT2n - The generation of energy created by rubbing two objects against each other. The rubbing part will then occur due to the mechanical energy provided by the ocean waves.

Conclusion: In general, most of the solutions regarding waves or movements take into account the fact that the generation is able to take place on a fixed point. If we would use something that floats in water, this may become an issue. Therefore, although it is not the most optimal, PV energy generation (solar panels), seems to be the best solution.

Earthquake and flood detection:

  1. Early flood detection in developing countries: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4937387&tag=1 This paper discusses early flood detection systems specifically for developing countries. This is an interesting user as it is a big problem that does not get a lot of funding. This paper then also goes into developing a simple system that non-technical users in said developing countries can then also use. Although it does not go into too much technical detail, it gives a nice overview of a full system.
  2. Global flood detection system: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=1ef966548fb87e688d8096c29e7a2469a5d17ebf This paper discusses satellites being used for a Global Flood Detection System (GFDS). It goes into detail on how to detect these floods using satellite data from microwave detection sensors.
  3. Sensor-based river monitoring: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202301.0561/v2 The sensor is based above the water that measures water level with sonar. Besides the water level it can measure air and soil temperature, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and direction, rainfall, and atmospheric pressure.
  4. Gauging (gaging for Americans) stations: https://geology.com/articles/gaging-station.shtml This is not really a paper, but it gives a simple explanation of how most rivers are measured.
  5. Satellite vs gauge: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022169405006256 This paper compares rainfall data from gauges and satellites and concludes that gauges are more accurate and are taken as reference always.

Climate change / rise in water level:

Most of the state of art mentioned in the section above integrates measurements of rise in water level. Measuring sea level is done with with satellites https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-019-09569-1 This paper explains how sea level is measured with satellites, which is a difficult problem due to how the earth is shaped and how gravity affects the water.

Monitoring aquatic flora and fauna:

For the monitoring of aquatic flora and fauna, the target group would be very dependent on what needs to be monitored, therefore some potential ideas could be a general monitoring buoy or a buoy that specifically monitors some type of flora or fauna. For the concept of more specific monitoring types of buoys, one article that was found was seen to be making a prototype of a buoy that is used to monitor a certain type of naturally occurring harmful algae: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9269340?casa_token=Zd6UuMqNOzUAAAAA:L0hEid16nuf2RkAiAwKQq3qmjLf20eA8NeGWoLWJqAi7g5BqLbC81ZHZl05Sas68oqBI8mVxDA. Therefore, a potential idea could be to look into what sort of naturally occurring aquatic flora or fauna that would be harmful or even deadly to humans and use buoys to monitor these sort of situations. But this would come with some questions and flaws. For example what sensors would need to be used, how much power is used to continuously monitor this and where would be optimal location in the body of water to get the clearest results from the buoy about its measurements.

One the other hand, another potential use for monitoring aquatic flora and fauna would be for research purposes. An example would be the naturally occurring temporary streams seen in the following article https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wat2.1223. But this specific idea might include some vital questions, for example would the temporary streams always be in the same location, has human urbanisation affected these streams at all, and are buoys a suitable way of measuring these streams for the flora and fauna.

Buoys / other water thing, general & smart:

Smart Buoys

During the search of the state-of-the-art for smart buoys, many of the articles found consisted of potential prototypes for different varieties of buoys that were deemed to be 'smart buoys'. Smart buoys can be considered to fit in all the previous. This section will briefly discuss some potential implementations and key questions that would need to be asked when considering a 'smart buoy', that does not go into as specific topics as the previous headings. First of all, from the following article https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9389065?casa_token=v1iLJdDU9aQAAAAA:hti71IRV6XXgflmDxqO0QJ1bzK-giHRImvC4JeY6JnXn2hj0Z45GVwvBPukmVMOL1-gyF9qkvQ, multiple questions were seen to be important for the designing and making of smart buoys and even buoys in general. The most important question that can be deduced is in what sort of body of water will the buoy be deployed in. For example, Oceans and Seas are more unpredictable and destructive due to being large bodies of water, whereas a lake is usually much calmer, even in more extreme weather conditions. Following this, another question that was seen is in what sort of depth would the buoys be deployed in. This can directly impact some decisions that would be made, such as connections for swarm behaviour. For example in shallower, it might be a possibility connect the buoys using wires, but in deeper waters it might be better to connect them wirelessly. This would then also impact what would need to be put on the buoy so that it would function as intended, such as what hardware and software would need to be used, and how would it be powered, which is looked into in the Generating electricity section.

This following article showed a potential way a 'smart buoy' could be implemeted as a state-of-the-art idea: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4099173?casa_token=KUV7FHj5NFUAAAAA:_IQbjLXYaynpEfAHVrqD5MLHcfGcV4nyolt6auvFSZZQ7zUhhcor-JBIMuTrrfhW9gOqmG4sUA. The main concept of the prototype mentioned here is that a 'smart buoy' could be used in an auto aligning fashion and the reason that this might be important is because many buoys already existing are used to guide ships with some used to moore smaller ships away from shore. But since the seas and oceans can be quite unpredictable, harsh weather can sweep away buoys from their initial location which can affect how ships and boats would move around. The degree of how far it might be swept away would depend on the anchor being used. But if auto aligning buoys are used, then there might not be a need for heavily anchored buoys as the auto aligning buoy could move back to its original position using a GPS or something along those lines. But the biggest problem with this sort of idea is that it would once again bring about some major problems that would need to be sorted. For example how would it be connected to the GPS and how much power would it use

Week 2

Summary of what has been researched during this week + Carnaval break

Note: We have not provided all links in this wiki yet, however, for every statement made below, a corresponding article exists in our group Google Docs file.

Our group has decided on specifically focusing on deplaying some kind of buoy in coral reefs. At first, our group was focussed on the different kind of variables that are able to be measured in the ocean/coral reefs. Some of these variables, and their respective sensors are:

Parameter Sensor type Representative sensors
Depth Pressure sensor SBE 41/41CP Argo CTD; Rockland Scientific MicroCTD; OTT CTD Sensor
Temperature Thermistor https://www.star-oddi.com/products/submersible-water-sensors/conductivity-salinity-sensor; A lot more
Salinity Electric https://www.star-oddi.com/products/submersible-water-sensors/conductivity-salinity-sensor
Turbidity Optical IR Aanderaa Turbidity Sensor 4112; Chelsea Technologies UniLux Turbidity
Dissolved Oxygen Optical Blue Light / Electrochemical SBE 63 Optical Dissolved Oxygen Sensor / SBE 43 Dissolved Oxygen Sensor
Dissolved CO2 Optical IR SubCTech Underwater CO2 Sensor MK5
pH Electrochemical SBE SeaFET V2 Ocean pH Sensor; Seanic pH probe
Ammonium Electrochemical Potentiometric Xylem ISE sensor for ammonium-WTW
Phosphates Optical Visible / IR SBE HydroCycle-PO4

We found that most of these variables are either already being measured by means of satelite imagery or by means of in situ (in person) data collection. Moreover, most of these variables are being measured only on the surface of the ocean, not in the depths.

Research has also been done in the effects that coral reefs have on the environment. The first, and often seen as largest impact, is that coral reefs serve as a habitat for a large veriaty of fish and other aquatic lifeforms. Secondly, coral reefs serve as wave dampeners, lessening the impact of, for example, large waves or even tsunamis. An lastly, a lot of people rely on coral reefs as a source of income.

We have also preemtively looked into the different stakeholders that our project could have. These include:

  • First party stakeholders
    • Marine researchers
  • Other stakeholders
    • The entire population (climate change)
    • The government
    • Second party climate researchers
    • Investors (could be government)

Furthermore, the idea of using a buoy on the ocean surface brings some technical challenges with it. It could have issues with sending/receiving data (communication in general), issues with battery life and energy generation, and lastly the difficult terrain of coral reefs.

Design that was chosen

Ultimately, it was decided that the best course of action would be to not focus in a specific variable to sense (because all important variables are already being sensed in some way), but focus on the way variables can be sensed. We have therefore come up with the idea of designing a buoy/base of operation which is able to lower a self chosen sensor (chosen by the researcher for the specific variable they want to sense) to a specific depth inside of a coral reef. This should be done in such a way that it does not disturb the local population and it should not damage its surroundings either. We will therefore focus our research on the movement part, as we noticed (as has also been said the the aforementioned sections) that almost all remote sensing technices used today focus on the surface of the water, rather than the depths, which is mostly done in situ. Therefore, we believe that this is an important to be able to do this remotely, to ultimately remove the need for human interaction with the coral reefs.

Week 3


Week 4


Week 5


Week 6


Week 7


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