A virtual conductivity sensor for environmental measurements

Concerning environmental measurement systems, particularly those that are used for water quality assessment, physical sensors are expensive to maintain and the usage of virtual sensors is an attractive solution. This paper presents a virtual conductivity sensor based on a water tide level and a dissolved oxygen sensors. A particular attention is devoted to explore the correlations that exist between different water quality parameters, such as, conductivity and dissolved oxygen, and others waters' variables, namely, water tide level and tidal current direction and amplitude. A fault detection and a recovery mechanism, based on a distributed virtual sensor network, is also proposed. Several experimental results are presented and their discussion is promoted.