Water supply systems security: novel technologies for the online monitoring of unforeseeable events

摘要

Nowadays, the demand for more efficient and comprehensive online water monitoring technologies is spurred by more stringent regulatory constraints placed on water companies to provide high quality drinking water, increasing water resources scarcity, forcing water suppliers in many areas of the planet to rely on marginal water bodies, and the threat of hostile actions by political extremists and terrorists groups, that may willingly and deliberately cause contamination of an otherwise safe supply. Traditionally, quality parameters associated with drinking water provision were monitored using routine grab samples followed by laboratory analysis. This approach only allowed the capture small data sets, mostly unrepresentative of the true variance at the source, and allowed potentially important events to occur undetected. This paper examines state-of-the-art technologies for the online monitoring of water quality in supply water systems.