Drinking water distribution systems reach the majority of American homes, business and
civic areas, and are therefore an attractive target for terrorist attack via direct
contamination, or backflow events.
Instrumental monitoring of such systems may be used to signal the presence of
contaminants in drinking water. There is a need to understand how and if
instrumentation can be used to sense contaminant introduction. Tests of instruments
were run on a simulated distribution system at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(USEPA) Test and Evaluation (T&E) Facility in Cincinnati, Ohio, using potential chemical
threat agents.
There is a need to process data in real time to provide an early warning of the change of
water quality due to the presence of contaminants. There is also a need to provide an
indication of what classification (group or class) of chemical may be present in the water
sample.
Data from the USEPA tests were passed through a set of Hach Homeland Security
Technology (HST) algorithms to determine if such alarm outputs could be obtained. The
results show that the milligram-per-liter (mg/L) concentrations of chemicals yielded
enough response to provide an early warning alarm. The results may also be useful in
classifying and estimating the chemical concentration in the water sample. Includes 6 references, figures.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 420 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 22 |
| Published : | 11/01/2005 |
