EESS talk on "Wear-and-tear of water quality sensors – Challenges and opportunities"
Event details
| Date | 23.10.2018 |
| Hour | 12:15 › 13:15 |
| Speaker | Dr Kris Villez, Group Leader, Department of Process Engineering, EAWAG, CH Kris Villez leads the Spike research group at Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology). This group specializes in the development and experimental validation of methods for monitoring and automation of water treatment processes. He started his activities at Eawag in 2012 and received tenure in 2017. A unique feature of his research group is the coverage of both black-box and white-box modelling methods in pursuit of solutions to monitoring and automation challenges in natural and engineered systems. Kris Villez is a fellow of the International Water Association (2016-2020) and actively contributes the mission of the Swiss Water Association (VSA). |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract:
The abundant occurrence of faults and failures in sensors for environmental process monitoring is frequently cited as a major challenge for process monitoring and control of environmental systems. Despite the wide recognition of this challenge, little is known about the cause-and-effect relationships between sensor wear-and-tear (e.g., salt deposition, fouling) and the appearance of fault symptoms (e.g. signal drift). To alleviate this situation, a specialized experiment has been conducted by exposing 8 pH sensors to the same medium over a period of two years. This experiment reveals that commonly held assumptions regarding the onset of sensor faults do not hold in practice. Indeed, the recorded observations indicate that (1) sensor faults, like signal drift, appear simultaneously rather than independently and that (2) none of the commercial sensors produce signals that are free of drift at any time. Despite these challenging observations, it appears possible to predict the expected drift in the near future, which suggests that a reliable approach to predictive maintenance of sensor networks is feasible.
The abundant occurrence of faults and failures in sensors for environmental process monitoring is frequently cited as a major challenge for process monitoring and control of environmental systems. Despite the wide recognition of this challenge, little is known about the cause-and-effect relationships between sensor wear-and-tear (e.g., salt deposition, fouling) and the appearance of fault symptoms (e.g. signal drift). To alleviate this situation, a specialized experiment has been conducted by exposing 8 pH sensors to the same medium over a period of two years. This experiment reveals that commonly held assumptions regarding the onset of sensor faults do not hold in practice. Indeed, the recorded observations indicate that (1) sensor faults, like signal drift, appear simultaneously rather than independently and that (2) none of the commercial sensors produce signals that are free of drift at any time. Despite these challenging observations, it appears possible to predict the expected drift in the near future, which suggests that a reliable approach to predictive maintenance of sensor networks is feasible.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- EESS - IIE
Contact
- Prof. Janet Hering, EAWAG