Microplastics, tiny plastics around 5 millimeters in diameter, have become a rising issue with the continued use of plastic in our daily lives. A team of students in Pakistan has taken note of the water contamination with microplastics in the Sindh region in particular. These microplastics threaten the health and safety of aquatic ecosystems, marine life, and humans. They accumulate over time, making them a continued threat to environmental health.
Current methods of detection are labor-intensive, expensive, and not precise, making them unaccessible. To remedy this issue, a team of students from the Mehran University of Engineering and Technology Student Branch and Instrument and Measurement Society has joined with the Rotaract Club of Hyderabad Galaxy to create an innovative microplastic detection system.
The system offers rapid, accurate, and efficient monitoring of microplastic contamination in aquatic environments. To do so, the team created the device using the following parts: an advanced filtration system, high-powered microscopes to visually identify the microplastics with analysis software, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for analysis and classification, data integration, which will gather data from different sensors to compare, and a user interface for users to access the data for real-time insights to microplastic data.
The actual hardware components include high-powered microscopes, filtration equipment, digital cameras, data loggers and transmitters, communication devices, high-performance computers, microcontrollers, and microplastic samples.
The software used open-source tools to develop the custom software application of the prototype device. Most of the software-based work including image analysis, AI model development, data analysis and visualization tools, and user interface development tools were performed in Python.
As the project progresses, local communities will receive training to use the device, which can improve the quality of water and awareness of microplastics in rural Pakistani communities.
This project was made possible by a grant of $5,448.00 from the Instrumentation and Measurement Society Society (IMS), an EPICS in IEEE partner.