Design of a drinking water quality monitoring and evaluation system | Water Practice & Technology | IWA Publishing

With the rapid development of industry and agriculture, water pollution is found everywhere, and the protection of water resources has attracted increasing attention. For a long time, drinking water pollution was measured manually, which is time-consuming and laborious. To effectively detect and evaluate drinking water pollution, a drinking water quality monitoring and evaluation system is designed. The system can perform real-time measurements of water temperature, conductivity, turbidity and other parameters. The measurement results can be displayed on an LCD screen and can be transmitted remotely. The system can be used to detect the contamination of drinking water resources, such as surface water and groundwater, and to judge whether the water quality is qualified according to the set threshold parameters. The test results demonstrate that the system can realize dynamic monitoring and evaluation of drinking water resources. In addition, the system can provide effective data for water resource environmental protection.

Drinking water is essential to life. Water is necessary for cooking and drinking. The amount of water that is required per day varies according to physical activity, age, health problems and environmental conditions (Kotlarz et al. 2018). People around the world currently drink at least one liter of water per day according to research, and more than 5% drink three liters of water per day. For those working in hot climates, 16 liters of water may be needed per day. Hence, drinking water is important (Ameer et al. 2017).

Drinking water resources are extremely scarce. Globally, only 89% of the population has access to adequate drinking water from a source that is suitable for drinking (Van Nevel et al. 2017). In some regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, only 40–80 percent of the population can obtain clean drinking water. From the sources of drinking water, nearly 4.2 billion people worldwide can obtain tap water, while another 2.4 billion can obtain spring or public tap water. The World Health Organization considers having safe drinking water to be a fundamental human right, but approximately 12 billion people lack safe drinking water.

Drinking water is a highly important water resource and a basic requirement for human survival. Drinking water is important to daily life and plays a vital role in the development of society (Moriasi et al. 2015). Therefore, people should always be aware of the pollution and safety of drinking water resources (Seth et al. 2016). Through a reasonable assessment of drinking water safety and health risks, reasonable plans and solutions can be developed for the management of water resources (Bilgin & Konanç 2016). With rapid industrial and economic development, varying degrees of harm to drinking water have been caused, and water pollution, water shortages, and the pollution of rivers and lakes are becoming increasingly severe (Wang et al. 2017). Therefore, the protection of drinking water is of high significance.

With the increasingly severe pollution of drinking water resources, people’s awareness of the protection of drinking water gradually strengthened, and management departments increased the intensity of water resource detection (Abyaneh 2014). However, in the traditional water quality detection system there are many shortcomings, such as high cost, large volume, inability to realize the remote transmission of parameters, and single measurement parameters. In view of the scenario that is described above, a drinking water quality monitoring and evaluation system is designed. Through this system, tap water and surface water can be detected automatically, the quality of drinking water can be estimated, and the remote dynamic monitoring of water quality and water conditions can effectively reduce the human, material and financial resources that are invested in water resource protection. At the same time, the system can conduct on-line water quality assessment. The assessment is based on threshold parameters that are set by experienced managers. When a value is uploaded to the cloud assessment system, the system can automatically determine whether the water quality in the region is qualified according to the threshold (Wang et al. 2018).