The online measurement of ground water quality, as one important area of water resource protection, can provide real-time measured water quality parameters and send out warning information in a timely manner when the water resource is polluted. Based on ultraviolet (UV) spectrophotometry, a remote online measurement method is proposed and used to measure the ground water quality parameters chemical oxygen demand (COD), total organic carbon (TOC), nitrate nitrogen (NO3-N), and turbidity (TURB). The principle of UV spectrophotometry and the data processing method are discussed in detail, the correlated mathematical modeling of COD and TOC is given, and a confirmatory experiment is carried out. Turbidity-compensated mathematical modeling is proposed to improve the COD measurement accuracy and a confirmatory experiment is finished with turbidity that ranges from 0 to 100 NTU (Nephelometric Turbidity Unit). The development of a measurement instrument to detect the ground water COD, TOC, NO3-N, and TURB is accomplished; the test experiments are completed according to the standard specification of China's technical requirement for water quality online automatic monitoring of UV, and the absolute measuring errors of COD, TOC, and NO3-N are smaller than 5.0%, while that of TURB is smaller than 5.4%, which meets the requirements for the online measurement of ground water quality.
Keywords: COD; TOC; ground water quality; online detector; spectrophotometry; turbidity.