A Preliminary Characterization of a Water Contaminant Detection System Based on a Multi-sensor Microsystem

The evaluation of measurement quality is a primary task when performing sensing activities based on low–cost sensor technologies. In detail, in this work electrical impedance measurements on different sensors are proposed in order to have a dataset of raw data to be used to perform classification of possible contaminants in water environment. In detail, the sensor technology is based on a proprietary multi-sensing platform which is arranged in a suitable set-up able to carry out measurements in water for prolonged times. Sensors metalized with different materials are jointly used to exploit sensitivity diversity to different contaminants. An ad–hoc measurement procedure has been designed, including data acquisition during warm–up period, contaminant injection and steady state conditions. Since different releases of the platform have been developed, here we propose a comparison between two versions to demonstrate the technological advance in sensor integration and miniaturization leading to higher reliable results. A metrological analysis of the obtained measurements with two different platform versions is carried out and compared results are reported.