Abstract
M.Tech. (Electrical Engineering)
The study makes use of cloud computing for monitoring the quality of groundwater and electronic sensors to detect physical and chemical characteristics of domestic water used in the rural areas, Mpumalanga province. The data is made available via the database and then to the cloud. The monitoring of water quality is important to humans because access to clean and potable water is the greatest challenge experienced by rural residents in South Africa. The study determines the physical and chemical constituents and highlights the key relevant substances to domestic water quality and detects the level of contamination in the groundwater from the boreholes in Mpumalanga province. By setting up an experiment based on secondary and primary data from the boreholes used by the rural residents of Mpumalanga province, a cost-effective, scalable and flexible model using cloud computing was developed. There were three phases of this study, first to determine the constituents that highly contaminates the boreholes and it was carried out by analysing the existing groundwater boreholes data (secondary data) provided by the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) or by manually checking the properties using sensors (primary data) and making this available in the database. The study used the cloud to monitor the quality of groundwater. The second phase was to develop a cloud computing model for groundwater quality monitoring in the rural areas. The third phase qualitative interviews were conducted to get more insight on contamination of groundwater and this assisted in enhancing the developed model. The contribution of the dissertation was towards providing a centralised solution for groundwater monitoring to assist water consumers, water monitoring organisation (E.g.: Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation) to be pro-actively informed concerning issues in the water supplied to the rural residents. This will be a major contribution for the country in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and Millennium Development Goals by ensuring that safe drinking water is supplied to the residents in rural areas. Our study showed that all the parameters from the actively monitored boreholes located in the 18 Mpumalanga (South Africa) municipalities were within the...