There is an Arduino water quality monitoring and notification project documented at:

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/eani/water-quality-monitoring-and-notification-system-f85d23

which may be a good starting point.

You will likely need to swap the sensors used with ones which can detect the specific chemical elements you are interested in detecting/measuring.

Hi Michael,

Interesting idea, but you need to do some research as to the specific types of chemicals you want to detect.

Your sensor selection will be determined by the chemicals and the levels of concentration that you want to monitor/detect.

You might want to start with a salt taster circuit using the resistivity of the water to indicate different levels of salt in the water.

It is a simple circuit to make and it will give you experience in working with a simple sensor.

From there, you need to research the various chemicals you want to look for and identify affordable sensors to detect them.

DAB

Hi Michael,

I'm not mega-familiar with chemistry, but another technique (depending on your requirements) is to use a spectrometer technique, and it ranges from the simple (using razor blades and a CDROM as a diffraction grating) to the expensive (using a commercial slit+diffraction grating). Once you start getting serious about it in terms of effort and time producing a good quality one, the commercial systems start looking low cost : (  (around £500 for a manual one that you look through for spectral lines, or £2-3k GBP for a CCD based one).

Chapter 11 of this book on sensor technology gives amongst other things a summary of sensors used for:

• physical water sensing
• chemical water sensing
• biological pathogen water sensing

Sensor Technologies

Healthcare, Wellness and Environmental Applications

By Michael J. McGrath , Cliodhna Ni Scanaill

ISBN13: 978-1-4302-6013-4

Sensor Technologies - Healthcare, Wellness and Environmental Applications

The eBook is available as a free download through ApressOpen.

I will take a look at this book, could be very useful around the lab.

DAB

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the information. I had a quick scan and it really looks like its the right place for me to begin. although its in C/C++. I will need to convert things into Java as I want it to run in Java.

Hi Dab,

I was basically thinking about all chemicals in the periodic table.

Regards

Michael

Hi Shabaz,

all comments are very appreciated, however, I think were looking at V5.8 here lol.

I just want to get a little functionality detecting chemical elements with sensors connected to arduino/raspberry Pi.

Once detected display information on screen as to how much is in the water.

Best Regards

Michael

Ah, you might want to wait, as I am currently writing a book where I completely change the Periodic table based upon my new Atomic Model.

In the book I explain why Deuterium and Tritium were excluded and how there are lots of other variations of the elements that the current table just ignores.

As for detecting each element, that will be best done by atomic weight.

The idea of a mix of protons and neutrons is incorrect, as is the idea that electrons orbit the nucleus in many layers.

I will expand on these ideas later, but just be aware that what you thought you knew about atoms is going to change.

DAB

It's a simple matter of finding the appropriate sensor, calibrating it before each test and then scaling the voltage (or current) reading by the appropriate calibration factor. You can do this for pH (concentration of hydrogen ions) with some difficulty (very high impedance instrumentation amplifier required to sense mV signal, calibration required for each use, adjustment of calibration curve for sample temperature. But it goes down hill from there pretty fast. Let's take sodium, for example, as there is some sodium in almost all water samples. There are electrodes which respond to sodium down to mg/L but they cost hundreds of dollars, take up to 20 minutes to stabilize, and, like pH electrodes, have to be calibrated every time they are used and require very high impedance instrumentation amplifiers.There are techniques for detecting mg/L levels of many of the ions found in water some of which, like sodium, involve ion selective electrodes but for others things like ion couples plasma, absorption spectometry and visible spectrometry are required. Etc.

Moving on to the organics which are, these days, a major concern in water analysis, we move on to gas chromatography and GC followed by mass spectrometry.  All doable but not at the level of an Arduino/Rasberry pi hobbyist.

DAB: apparently you have somehow missed the last, say, 70 years in physics nor do you seem to grasp the basic ideas behind current thinking in this discipline.

Periodic tables do include deuterium and trititium as well as protium. The listed atomic weight is an average which includes these two isotopes (that's what we call something with the same proton number as another form of the same element with a different atomic number) weighted by their relative abundance. Any good periodic table will list all the isotopes (or at least the most abundant ones) of each element.

Nobody (well, nobody with fundamental understanding) has though of electrons as orbiting the nucleus in 'layers' for years. That was a model, the first one, and it didn't last long, perhaps because it isn't a very good one.

The modern model (nucleus made up of protons and neutrons made up of quarks surrounded by an electron cloud) is based on quantum mechanics but you must understand that it is, though to date never contradicted by experiment, just a model and, as such, subject to later refinement or perhaps replacement by a better model (unified theory?, string theory?) but you cannot say it is wrong as it is only a model. You can say it is not a good model if you can present data that contradicts it.