Adaptive multi-nutrient monitoring system (ADAPT-NP)

Water pollution, in the form of nutrient enrichment and algal blooms, causes water quality problems across the globe, resulting in health risks and large costs to water managers and regulators tasked with ensuring clean water supply and healthy rivers, lakes and reservoirs. Monitoring of water chemistry is essential for complying with relevant regulations and maintaining water security.

Nutrient chemistry is typically measured by manual sampling and later laboratory analysis. The laborious, discrete, non-real-time nature of this method means that pollution events cannot be suitably characterised in a timely manner or can sometimes be missed completely. Low frequency and single nutrient measurement also currently limits our ability to understand processes or forecast future conditions accurately.

The challenge the project addresses:

Recent innovations and the development of high-frequency nutrient auto-analysers have the potential to transform our understanding of nutrient/pollutant sources and dynamics. This move to near real-time data provides the opportunity to significantly improve how catchments are managed and resources are protected. They are therefore of great potential interest to water companies and regulators, as evidence of meeting water quality targets and identifying pollutant sources.

However, state-of-the-art commercial nutrient auto-analyser instruments are expensive to purchase (e.g. £20-35K per device), and expensive to run with high reagent costs and service contracts, they can be unreliable. In addition, conventionally, individual nutrients are monitored by different devices, resulting in prohibitively high costs for multiple separate nutrient systems. This is a critical barrier to the widespread adoption of nutrient monitoring sensors in freshwaters.