E! 7732 WMS Aqua-Q AB
| Reference number | |
| Coordinator | Aqua-Q AB |
| Funding from Vinnova | SEK 1 700 698 |
| Project duration | April 2013 - September 2015 |
| Status | Completed |
Purpose and goal
The international market for water treatment sets high demands on the safety of drinking water supplies. Today there are more than 600,000 waterworks that are potential clients for WMS (Water Monitoring System). There is a major effort to develop warning systems for online monitoring of microorganisms, but there is as yet no ready-made systems on the market. WMS has the goal of using a high-resolution particle sensor to detect and identify individual microorganisms in water.
Results and expected effects
The system that has been developed in the project provides a unique signal for the parasites Cryptosporidium and Giardia. This signal is also present in the surface water which is a very positive result. The system has been trained to detect the signal even in the surface water and can distinguish this signal from all other signals from particles found in surface water. More tests are needed to be able to verfy that the system does not give false positives as well as to determine the detection limit for the system.
Approach and implementation
By analyzing the water that is produced by reverse osmosis (contains no particles) and then add only the parasites the system was trained to detect the unique signal (signature) from the parasites by algorithms for clustering. The next step was to analyze the surface water that contains all different types of particles and add parasites to validate that the system can identify only the parasites and not all the other particles in the surface water (false positives).