Standing
Undergraduate
Type of Proposal
Poster Presentation
Faculty
Faculty of Science
Faculty Sponsor
Chris Houser
Proposal
In order to learn more about the natural world, there is a growing need to conduct research of increasing scale and/or resolution. During field work, this necessitates the use of high accuracy equipment, which can be expensive and is often lost or damaged during deployment. Consequently, there is growing interest in “do it yourself” (DIY) equipment that is affordable and easy to build without sacrificing performance. The DIY Pressure Transducer is one such piece of equipment which provides coastal researchers with a more affordable alternative for monitoring water level fluctuations such as wave height and period. The DIY device built for this study consisted of a simplified Arduino microcontroller and a waterproof housing made primarily from polyvinyl chloride. In contrast to commercial pressure transducers which can cost thousands of dollars, a DIY transducer can be assembled for under $500. To determine accuracy, DIY transducers were tested against a commercial instrument. In both still and turbulent water, it was found that pressure readings from each DIY device varied by some constant offset from the commercial instrument due to imprecise factory calibration of the MS5803-14BA sensor module used. After accurately recording the offset for each DIY device, the data was corrected and agreeable to the commercial transducer bystudy, future works are planned to deploy dense sensor arrays to monitor the impact of waves on coastal erosion at scales previously not possible.
Availability
30th: 12-3, 31st: 1-2
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Special Considerations
I'd like to display a working pressure transducer along with the electronics, so space for a small table would be appreciated.
Inexpensive Pressure Transducer for Monitoring Waves in Coastal Systems
In order to learn more about the natural world, there is a growing need to conduct research of increasing scale and/or resolution. During field work, this necessitates the use of high accuracy equipment, which can be expensive and is often lost or damaged during deployment. Consequently, there is growing interest in “do it yourself” (DIY) equipment that is affordable and easy to build without sacrificing performance. The DIY Pressure Transducer is one such piece of equipment which provides coastal researchers with a more affordable alternative for monitoring water level fluctuations such as wave height and period. The DIY device built for this study consisted of a simplified Arduino microcontroller and a waterproof housing made primarily from polyvinyl chloride. In contrast to commercial pressure transducers which can cost thousands of dollars, a DIY transducer can be assembled for under $500. To determine accuracy, DIY transducers were tested against a commercial instrument. In both still and turbulent water, it was found that pressure readings from each DIY device varied by some constant offset from the commercial instrument due to imprecise factory calibration of the MS5803-14BA sensor module used. After accurately recording the offset for each DIY device, the data was corrected and agreeable to the commercial transducer bystudy, future works are planned to deploy dense sensor arrays to monitor the impact of waves on coastal erosion at scales previously not possible.