Virtual water quality tests with an electronic tongue

The concept of the "electronic tongue" has been used in some experiments to establish the needs of fast and virtual monitoring of aqueous samples, e.g., in the monitoring of drinking water quality. More specifically, the performance of a proposed multi-electrode sensor system, used for voltammetric analysis of aqueous samples, is described. It is, for example, shown how such an "electronic tongue" can be used to monitor the quality of water in a production plant for drinking water. It is pointed out that conventional techniques often determine single concentration of the measured test while in many areas of measurement technology the methodology to extract adequate information from the environment, e.g., the electronic tongue, makes a total water quality estimate based on predetermined constraints extracted from complicated pattern structures. In this approach, experiments are conducted using an electronic tongue to virtually monitor the drinking water quality, measured from the raw water in the river to the tap water of the consumer. It can be shown that a system based on the proposed multi-electrode virtual sensor system is able to detect water quality changes. In these experiments, with the use of signal analysis and statistical multivariate methods we are able to estimate the water quality.