River monitoring
Our samplers and analyzers are two complementary products for water sampling and monitoring in natural settings. Placed at various strategic points along a river, coastal zone, or lake, they perform sampling and microbiological or chemical analysis operations.
Several systems can be interconnected in a daisy chain configuration, thus multiplying the total number of samples that can be taken and analyzed without field intervention. This allows for a high-resolution, time-location mapping of water quality.
Of particular interest are the periods during or directly after storms and floods, where the large amounts of pesticides or pollutants that enter into the water system need to be monitored. This can provide the necessary information to identify problem areas and optimize the treatment strategy of a polluted river system. In adverse weather conditions, it may be delicate or almost impossible to send a person to collect relevant samples day and night. The ability to remotely activate the system for sampling or real-time analysis over GSM network, ensures representative data at the right time with low risk and minimal logistical complications.
Sea and ocean monitoring
fluidion products can also be deployed in ocean water settings, in which case the design and choice of materials are adapted to these more extreme conditions (biofouling, corrosion, etc.). The deployment of our samplers and analyzers can be performed by attaching the system to instrumented buoys, to robotic underwater vehicles (gliders for example), or to ocean vessels.
Implementation of a sampler on an instrumented buoy is of particular interest in ocean monitoring applications. Indeed the sampler can be activated on the alert of an external, third party sensor measuring above a certain threshold. The opportunity to take a sample at this precise time enables retrieval of the sample in order to perform laboratory measurements to understand the cause of the threshold alert. In addition, performing regular maintenance operations on buoys is a very complex and expensive endeavor. The sensors installed on these buoys are prone to measurement drift over time and the reliability of measurements can be quite variable. A periodic measurement made by our analyzer (zero drift) would enable recalibration of the measurements made by in-line sensors and improve the reliability and confidence of the data.
