Submersible High Precision PAHs Detection System for Marine Oil Spills Disaster Management

This paper develops a submersible polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) detection system, which can be equipped to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) to implement a reconnaissance investigation of the marine oil spill. PAHs are the main harmful ingredients to marine ecosystem when marine oil spills happen. Monitoring the PAHs concentration gradient and distribution in the involved sea areas helps to identify minor spills before they cause widespread damage and identify parties potentially responsible for pollution, so it is an important component of oil spill disaster management. The system described in this paper employs a custom-built fluorometer to measure the dissolved PAHs concentration in seawater, so can reach a high sensible detection in a miniaturization size. We also explained the principle of detection, hardware architecture, firmware design and data analysis software detailedly. A 300 hours continuous testing is implemented to prove that the developed system is high reliable under unattended operation.