Smart Sensors for Environmental Monitoring
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Glasgow
Department Name: School of Engineering
Abstract
Future electronics will have great potential in environmental monitoring which will not be limited to agriculture, air pollution and water monitoring. There is a great need to develop novel compact sensor, which can provide an accurate real-time data for aforementioned applications. In this work, different sensing techniques including PH, capacitive and optical will be studied and after selecting a suitable technique a novel sensor will be designed for certain application e.g., monitoring plants growth, life and progress including detection of diseases or defects, which highly affect the overall quality of life of the plants and the agricultural environment surrounding them. The project proposes a novel sensing technique backed up by a prototype to sense the environmental parameters as mentioned before, which will be a ultimately a building block for developing smart agriculture/smart cities.
Organisations
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EP/N509668/1 | 01/10/2016 | 30/09/2021 | |||
| 1944936 | Studentship | EP/N509668/1 | 01/10/2017 | 31/03/2021 | Adnan Zahid |
| Description | With the rising scarcity of water resources in the plant science sector, many significant and modern techniques have been evolved in applied plant biology at a various level over the past decades. In most countries, agriculture is considered as the spine in the overall development of countries especially in developing countries due to its significant role in enhancing the economic development of the country. To meet with the challenging growth of population, it is important to have smart, sustainable, and precision agriculture to increase the productions of crops as well as providing concrete information of tailoring soils and crops by employing various sensors into the agricultural field. Precision agriculture includes the usage of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to a minimum degree for maximum production. Over the past decade, terahertz (THz) technology has seen an increased amount of interest in the scientific community chiefly due to its non-ionising and less pervasive radiation properties. There has been significant progress in tapping the so-called THz gap 0.3 THz to 3 THz of the electromagnetic spectrum. The THz technology has found extensive use in applications such as the imaging of concealed items, material characterisation, diagnostic applications including treatment of skin and dental care, effective and quality control of food [5], and telecommunication. Furthermore, a distinguishing feature of the THz waves is that the water molecules exhibit a strong absorption spectrum in the pertinent frequency range, leading to novel bio-sensing applications. We have proposed a novel and non-invasive electromagnetic technique to monitor the water content (WC) and characterisation in plant leaves using the absorption spectra of water molecules in the terahertz (THz) frequency for four consecutive days. We extracted the material properties of leaves of eight types of pot herbs from the scattering parameters, measured using a material characterisation kit in the frequency range of 0.75 to 1.1 THz. From the computed permittivity, it is deduced that the leaf specimens increasingly become transparent to the THz waves as they dry out with the passage of days. Moreover, the loss in weight and thickness of leaves were observed due to the natural evaporation of leaf moisture cells and change occurred in the morphology of fresh and water-stressed leaves. It is also illustrated that loss observed in WC on day 1 was in the range of 5% to 22%, and increased from 83.12% to 99.33% on day 4. Furthermore, we observed an exponential decaying trend in the peaks of the real part of the permittivity from day 1 to 4, which was reminiscent of the trend observed in the weight of all leaves. Thus, results in paper demonstrated that timely detection of water stress in leaves can help to take proactive action in relation to plants health monitoring, and for precision agriculture applications, which is of high importance to improve the overall productivity. Furthermore, we have also considered a machine learning algorithm along with Terahertz (THz), to further investigate the precise estimation of water content over the coursee for four days. The following list shows the work that has been published. Zahid, A.; T. Abbas, H.; Imran, M.A.; Qaraqe, K.A.; Alomainy, A.; Cumming, D.R.S.; Abbasi, Q.H. Characterization and Water Content Estimation Method of Living Plant Leaves Using Terahertz Waves. Appl. Sci. 2019, 9, 2781 Zahid, A., Abbas, H.T., Ren, A. et al. Machine learning-driven non-invasive approach of water content estimation in living plant leaves using terahertz waves. Plant Methods 15, 138 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13007-019-0522-9 Aifeng Ren, Adnan Zahid, Dou Fan, Xiaodong Yang, Muhammad Ali Imran, Akram Alomainy, Qammer H. Abbasi, "State-of-the-Art in Terahertz Sensing for Food and Water Security - A Comprehensive Review" Journal, Trends in Food Science & Technology, Volume 85, March 2019, Pages 241-25 |
| Exploitation Route | The proposed results can assist the research to develop a mathematical model for a particular leaf to study the internal morphological structure of leaf and results can be compared with the measured results. Also, it has opened the door for researchers to utilize the terahertz for agriculture applications and if any sensor can be developed that has the ability to work in the terahertz range, then, it will be certainly considered an innovative approach to monitoring the water content in leaves remotely. |
| Sectors | Agriculture, Food and Drink,Environment,Healthcare |