Potential of Low Cost Sensor Usage for Waste Water IOT System

Abstract Mining industry is one of the industries that require huge amount of water. 1 tonne of coal requires 800-3000 gallons of water to produce. Due to the massive volume of water requirements, coal mining company must carry out water conservation. Moreover, the waste water from a coal mining process contains pollutants from mining activities that are dangerous for the environment. Therefore, the waste water must be treated to annihilate any harmful pollution before the water can be flowed back to the water resources. Stringent government regulation requires companies to report waste water quality regularly. The task to collect waste water quality data is laborious as a company needs operators to measure and checks the parameters periodically. Therefore, an on-line system to measure and collect the information is in dearth. However, expensive industrial sensors pose difficulties for small-scale coal mining. The paper presents the potential of low cost sensor for waste water online monitoring in coal mine. The experiment uses sediment from the waste water pond of a coal mining site. Two sensors are used to measure pH and total suspended solid (TSS). While pH level can be directly read from the sensor, TSS reading uses estimation from turbidity sensor. Log linear regression is used to plot the relation between turbidity and TSS. The R value shows that the low cost turbidity sensor is able to estimate TSS.