2016 International Conference on Computer & Communication Engineering
Automated Water Tank Filteration System Using LDR
Sensor
S.Noorjannah Ibrahim, M.S.Lokman Hakim, A.L.Asnawi and N.A. Malik
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
International Islamic University Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
noorjannah@iium.edu.my ; aniliza@iium.edu.my; norehaa@iium.edu.my
Abstract — In this paper, we present the development of an
automated water tank filtration system together with the study on
water turbidity using light dependent resistor (LDR) as the sensing
unit. The system comprises of a microcontroller (Arduino Uno), a
micropump, a sensing unit and a water filter. The main objective of
this paper is to study the ability of LDR sensing unit in detecting
changes in water and to define the turbidity value of the water. This
paper also described how the microcontroller controls the filtration
system. Experiments on water turbidity was conducted under two
conditions, undisturbed flow and continuous flow, which will affect
the measurements of the LDR. Results show that the LDR readings
in continuous flow require more time in between reading so that the
turbidity value can be consistent. Results show that the LDR
sensing together with the microcontroller can create a system that
is capable of measuring water turbidity not only for water tanks
but also for other water resources e.g. rivers, lakes, treatment
plants etc. The implementation of an automated water filtration
system can potentially help consumers in monitoring their water
tanks and can be included in the smart home system.
Keywords – Automater Filtration System, LDR, turbidity, water
monitoring
I. INTRODUCTION
Water is the most valuable resource in this world. Water is
essential for human existence and well-being. Human use water
for numerous purposes in daily activities, for instance in
domestic households, water is used for washing, bathing,
cooking as well as drinking. Scheduled inspections and specific
cleaning procedures are required to ensure the cleanliness of
water in tanks particularly of high-rise buildings and residential
areas. These maintenance works are risky to the water operator’s
personnel and can be costly to consumers. The cleaning
procedures sometimes require chemicals that could also
contribute to the maintenance cost and water wastage during the
cleaning process.
A solution to prevent the risks of manual inspection and to
replace chemical related cleaning procedures is by implementing
an automated filtration system. The idea is to develop a system
that can detect water cloudiness that indicates the dirtiness of
water automatically. When this condition happens, the system
will start the filtration process. This is an innovative and
978-1-5090-2427-8/16 $31.00 © 2016 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICCCE.2016.51
effective way to reduce maintenance cost, and simplify cleaning
works. This technique could further be included as one part of a
smart home monitoring system.
Here, we studied the turbidity of water i.e., measure of
water cloudiness using a light-dependent resistor (LDR) in an
automated water tank filtration system. The automated system
comprises of a sensing unit, a microcontroller, a micropump and
a carbon water filter. The sensing unit consists of a light-
dependent resistor (LDR) and a light-emitting diode (LED),
positioned opposite one another inside a black PVC pipe. By
using an algorithm, the microcontroller (Arduino Uno) acquires
signals from the LDR and subsequently controls the operations
of the liquid micropump to regulate water flow to the water
filter.
The implementation of an automated water filtration system
can potentially help consumers, water operators and concession
companies in monitoring water resources and could preserve
water resource in Malaysia.
II. RELATED WORKS
A. Monitoring of water quality
Water covers at least 2/3 of the surface of the earth. Water
management is essential, particularly in monitoring the quality
of water. Water quality defines the condition of water in terms
of chemical, physical and biological characteristics that are safe
for human consumption. Human activities such as
manufacturing, mining and construction for example, have
resulted with the vast majority of surface water are polluted with
toxic. In fact, the water must be treated before it is safe to be
used by human. Hence, the complexity of water standard relates
closely to the ecology of the earth and human activities.
In Malaysia, the drinking water quality standard conforms to
the National Standard for Drinking Water Quality (2nd Version,
January 2004) issued by the Engineering Services Division,
Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH). The standard complies
with the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for
drinking water quality. In this standard in place, the company
who manage water treatment plant (WTP) and water distribution
195
to consumers must comply with the standard stipulated in
National Standard for Drinking Water Quality issued by the
MOH shown in Table 1[1].
TABLE I. WATER QUALITY STANDARD IN MALAYSIA [1]
Parameter Recommended Raw Drinking Water
Water Quality Quality Standards
Acceptable Value Maximum Acceptable
(mg/liter) Value (mg/liter)
E.Coli 5000 MPN/100ml 0 in 100 ml
Turbidity 1000 NTU 5 NTU
Color 300 TCU 15 TCU
pH 5.5-9.0 6.5-9.0
Free Residual - 0.2-5.0
Chlorine
The monitoring of the water quality supplied by WTP
operators and the treated water in the distribution system is
through sampling and testing methods by MOH. The common
technique of monitoring water quality requires samples of water
to be taken and brought to the laboratory at specific duration of
time. The monitoring of water quality parameters such as pH,
turbidity, conductivity, hardness, phosphate and nitrate is to
ensure the quality of water is within the stipulated standard [2].
Although, the amount of chlorine in water treatment plant is
sufficient to kill germs, however, the WTP operators
recommend consumers to conduct water quality checking
periodically at their homes because the internal plumbing system
and metal storage tanks could cause sediments and discoloration
in water. This issue has leads to the development of this project
that could solve and simplified the monitoring process of water
in storage tanks at housing area. Therefore, there is a necessity
to develop a system that is capable of monitoring the quality of
water in real time and could filter any sediments and
discoloration in water automatically.
The majority of water monitoring system employed
nowadays are for monitoring water resources such as lakes,
rivers, damp, water treatment/distribution plant etc. to ensure the
quality of water for human use. Many works conducted shown
advancements in the monitoring system. Some use wireless
sensor network to assess multiple parameters [3]. Other works
incorporate the water monitoring system with GSM or other
communications technique to allow real-time online monitoring
of water quality [4-6]. However not many works were conducted
to monitor water quality of water tanks at home. Hence, the
work in this paper is to study water turbidity in water tank using
LDR as one factor to monitor water quality.
III. METHODOLOGY
The automated water filtration system consists of : 1) sensor
unit; 2) microcontroller that receives and process data from
196
sensors; and 3) micropump that regulates water from the tank by
pumping out and flow the water to the filter as illustrated in Fig.
1. The LDR sends data to the Arduino Uno and monitor using
serial communication. Arduino analyzes the measured values
from the LDR and compares them to the reference value set to
trigger the liquid micropump ‘on’ and ‘off’. These measured
values are used to calculate the turbidity inside the water tank
and evaluate the functionality of the system.
3. Mircopump :
Regulate water in
and out of the tank.
2. Mircocontroller :
Receives and process
data from sensor.
Activates micropump.
1. Sensor unit :
LDR and LED are
positioned inside a
black PVC pipe.
Figure 1. Block diagram of the automated water tank filtration system.
A. LDR as turbidity sensor
In this work, the Light dependent resistor or LDR acts as the
sensor that indicates the cloudiness of water. The setup for
cloudiness sensing is by positioning light emitting diode or LED
opposite to the LDR. Made from a high-resistance
semiconductor, LDR is a variable resistor whose value decreases
with increasing incident of light intensity. If the incident of light
on LDR is of high frequency, photons absorbed by the
semiconductor material provide enough energy to bound
electrons to jump into the conduction band. The more incidents
of light on the LDR will result with more free electrons and
thereby lowering resistance of the LDR.
The LDR and LED were located inside a black PVC pipe
with distance 1.8cm between one another shown in Fig. 1. The
PVC pipe is placed inside the water tank at 5cm from the bottom
of the tank. For the sensing unit to work, the PVC pipe needs
two openings as inlet and outlet for the water to pass through the
LDR and LED setup. Fig.2 illustrates the measurement circuit of
LDR voltage used to determine the turbidity of water. When the
LED illuminates in clear water, the LDR will send low voltage
to the analog input of Arduino Uno. In contrary, when murky
water flows, the LDR will send Arduino Uno a high voltage
instead.
 Turbidity measurement due to relative light transmission
can be defined by the absorbance logarithm value [7]:
A= log (To/Ti),
where To is the incident luminous intensity and Ti is the
transmitted luminous intensity. However, the resistance of LDR
is inversely proportional to To, hence the absorbance can be
simplified as [6];
A= log (Rx/Ro).
Rx denotes as the value of resistance when the water becomes
murky and Ro is the initial condition resistance of the water. By
assuming that current flow is negligible and the value of VLDR in
Fig. 2 is proportional with respect to Rx/o in (2), the measured
input voltage into the Arduino Uno can be used to calculate the
turbidity of water.
VRo/x = VLDR*(5/ 1023) (Volts) (3)
The system also uses a relay circuit that functions as
(1) switching control so that the current does not overflow to the
Arduino board between ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ operations of the
micropump. Relay controls one electrical circuit by opening and
closing contacts in another circuit. For the micropump to works
automatically, the LDR input must be set to a reference value in
Arduino. Any value that is below the reference will stop the
(2) filtration operation whereas any value that exceeds the reference
will trigger the micropump and keep on flowing water to the
filter.
C. Experimental Setup
Water turbidity tests were conducted to evaluate the LDR
sensing ability using a setup shown in Fig. 4. Initial values VRo,
was determined as the LDR value for tap water. Then, 10gm,
20gm, 30gm, 40gm and 50 gm of soil to create water cloudiness
were mixed with the 2-litre of water. The sensing unit measured
the cloudiness of each mixture every 1 second and sent the
readings to the serial monitor. At least 7 readings were taken for
each setup. Then, the averaged values were used in turbidity
calculations. In this turbidity test, the micropump was set to be
‘off’.

Figure 2. Voltage divider for sensing LDR voltage where V LDR is measured to
the analog input of Arduino.

B. Microcontroller
The automated filtration water system uses Arduino Uno as
the microcontroller. The board has 14 digital input/output (I/O)
pins to connect with various sensors and devices. From these 14
pins, 6 can be used as pulse width modulation (PWM) outputs or
digital outputs (important for varying voltages in between 0V to
5V) and 6 analog inputs pin. The board is equipped with 10 bit
Figure 3. Relay circuitry for the automed filtration system
Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), a 16 MHz quartz crystal, a
USB connection, a power jack, an In-Circuit Serial
Programming (ICSP) header and a reset button to support
microcontroller operations. The digital I/O pins with 5V can
handle up to 20mA current while 3.3V can handle up to 50mA
current. This microcontroller also has 32KB of Flash Memory of
which only 0.5KB used by the bootloader.
Not only the microcontroller gives power supply to the
devices but it also acquires the readings from the sensing unit
involved. Note that Arduino Uno segments any readings from its
analog inputs i.e., VLDR in Fig. 2, to integer values between 0 to
1023 due to the 10-bit resolution of the Arduino’s ADC. Which
means, in order to get the actual measurements voltage of the
LDR sensor, the Arduino must convert the integer values using
this formula:

197
 Figure 4. The setup for measuring turbidity using the automated filtration
system.
After the turbidity testing, functionality test of the
automated filtration system was performed. This test is to ensure
the micropump and the LDR sensing can work properly during
continuous flow of water. In this test, the limit of LDR sensing
was set at 400. Mixture of water and soil will increase the value
and trigger the system to operate. Results from these
experiments are discussed in the following section.
IV. RESULTS
Turbidity values were determined by (3), with the average
value for VRo is 2.236V. The turbidity values against the soil
concentrations are plotted in Fig.5. It shows that the turbidity is
proportional to the increment of soil concentration. The high the
concentration of soil in water, high turbidity values were
recorded by the LDR sensor. The measured turbidity values are
also in logarithmic trend as shown in the graph.
Figure 5. Turbidity results from the LDR reading show in a non-continuous flow
(undisturbed) water.
As expected, the turbidity of water decreases as the
filtration process in progress as shown in Fig.6. In this test, the
the turbidity reading can be considered as the reading of
continuous flow water because the water from the filter will be
flowed back to the tank and create disturbance in the system.
Any disturbance in the water will cause the LDR reading to
fluctuate. Therefore, results were averaged LDR values for
every 1 minute.
The turbidity readings in Fig.6 show constant value for at
least 10 minutes at certain location during filtration before
giving sharp drop at the 11, 19 and 37 minutes. This suggests
that in continuous flow LDR sensor needs some time to stabilize
198
the readings and hence the time for measuring the turbidity
values must be within 5-10 minutes. The results in Fig. 6 no
longer follow the trend in (3), which means there are other
factors need to be considered in characterization of turbidity.
As we all know, there are many parameters that define the
quality of water. Here, we only discussed water turbidity and its
relation with the LDR sensing unit. As the system uses Arduino
Uno, other parameters such as pH, conductivity, hardness etc.
can be included to the system by simply connected to the analog
input. By using Arduino Uno, the system can also be expanded
to a wireless sensor network which can be useful to monitor
wider areas such as rivers, lakes and water treatment plants.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, by using low-powered microcontroller like
Arduino Uno and LDR sensing setup, an automated water
filtration system can be developed. The system is useful because
it allows users to monitor the quality of water (from the turbidity
parameter) and monitor the water filtration process. The system
is flexible and can be enhanced with more sensors such as pH
and conductivity sensors to realize a comprehensive water
monitoring system.
Figure 6. The turbidity results in disturbed or continuous flow water (during
filtration).
In this work, test on the LDR sensor that represent water
turbidity were studied for two water conditions; non –continuous
flow and continuous flow. Results show that the turbidity values
in non-continuous flow has consistent results and follows the
logarithmic trend depicted in (3). Meanwhile, in continuous
flow, the turbidity results show that time for measuring turbidity
must not be in short duration because the LDR sensor needs to
get the stabilize average reading as there are other factors need
to be considered in characterization of turbidity. For future
work, the automated water filtration system will be enhanced
with other sensors and incorporated into a web-based monitoring
system.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Data from this paper was measured using hardware
constructed for the Integrated Design Project (IDP) entitled
“Automated Water Tank Filtration System”. The Author would
like to thank Nurul Najah Najman, Nuradilah Hashim, Rafidah
Ismail and Khalida Hussin for their contributions in this project.
REFERENCES
[1] Drinking Water Quality Standard, http://kmam.moh.gov.my/public-
user/drinking-water-quality-standard.html, retrieved on 20th May 2016.
[2] T. L. Dinh, W. Hu, P. Sikka, P. Corke, L. Overs and S. Brosnan, “Design
and Deployment of a Remote Robust Sensor Network: Experiences from
an Outdoor Water Quality Monitoring Network,” Local Computer
Networks, 2007. LCN 2007. 32nd IEEE Conference on, Dublin, 2007, pp.
799-806.
[3] Peng Jiang,Zheming Wang,“Design of water environment monitoring
system based on wireless sensor network,” IEEE 2nd International
Conference on Industrial and Information Systems, pp., 2010.
199
[4] K. A. U. Menon, D. P and M. V. Ramesh, "Wireless sensor network for
river water quality monitoring in India," Computing Communication &
Networking Technologies (ICCCNT), 2012 Third International Conference
on, Coimbatore, 2012, pp. 1-7.
[5] A. S. Rao, S. Marshall, J. Gubbi, M. Palaniswami, R. Sinnott and V.
Pettigrovet, "Design of low-cost autonomous water quality monitoring
system," Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics
(ICACCI), 2013 International Conference on, Mysore, 2013, pp. 14-19.
[6] T. P. Lambrou, C. C. Anastasiou, C. G. Panayiotou and M. M. Polycarpou,
"A Low-Cost Sensor Network for Real-Time Monitoring and
Contamination Detection in Drinking Water Distribution Systems," in
IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 14, no. 8, pp. 2765-2772, Aug. 2014.
[7] Madrid, R. E., et al. "Multichannel bacterial growth analyser by impedance
and turbidity." Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing 32.6
(1994): 670-672.
[8] Saba Mylvaganam and Torgeir Jakobsen,“Turbidity Sensor For
Underwater Applications, Sensor Design and System Performancs with
Calibration Results”, pp.158-161.
[9] Datasheet for Arduino Uno by ArduinoTM,
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardUno, retrieved on 16th
March 2016.