IoT Sensor-Based Subsurface Monitoring and Adaptive Site Management

Abstract:

Every workday an army of professionals marches out to collect sparse temporal and spatial environmental samples to access the status of water, soils, and sediments in industrial settings. For many site-owners, long-term monitoring has become a primary cost for managing legacy releases. Adding insult to high cost, much of the data collected through current monitoring practices are of limited value due to tardy delivery of results and the ambiguous nature of temporally sparse data from monitoring wells.

New IoT technologies and real-time multiple level sensor-based approaches to monitoring are emerging that hold the promise of better knowledge for better decisions and lower costs. Herein, sensor-based IoT monitoring involves vertical strings of 10-30 matched point ORP (Oxidation-Reduction Potential) and temperature sensors. Each set of sensors is equipped with a water level pressure transducer, barometric pressure sensor, and systems status sensors. A system of sensors is referred to as a stick. Multiple sets of sticks at a site are referred to as an array. Data is uploaded via wireless connections on an hourly basis to secure cloud-based data storage/analytics/visualization platforms.

The emerging vision is that IoT sensor-based monitoring will facilitate 1) better long-term monitoring and 2) a basis for real-time adaptive site management. Ongoing work is focused on 1) cloud-based data storage/analytics/visualization platforms and 2) conducting large-scale field trials at precedent-setting sites. Going forward the plan is to engage all stakeholders in the opportunities of IoT Sensor-Based Monitoring and Adaptive Site Management. In years to come, we may well wonder about the days when we spent vast sums of money collecting sparse periodic data from obtuse monitoring wells and waited months to years to resolve potential risks to human health and the environment and/or the efficacy of our actions.