The Smart EDC Farmland Protection System

In order to solve some real environmental challenges, our team has proposed an integrated system that can both detect and degrade endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) suitable for farmland water protection.

When we started building this system, we aimed not only to solve a few farmers’ problems, but on a bigger scale, agricultural and industrial, since in most of the developing countries, factories could be easily found in between farmland. On the left-hand side of the slide, we developed the system that could sense the concentration of the EDC in the water and control the valve to protect the farmland from polluted water. And on the right-hand side of the slide, we could collect such data, such as the concentration, time, and place. If the number of devices could grow to dozens or say hundreds, we would be able to tell where and when did the pollution came from.

First, in normal days, the gate will remain half open and let the water comes into the channel. When the water passes through the gate, it will then passes through the filter. Enzyme mixed with activated carbon is filled in the filter, which can help filter out most of our target endocrine disrupting chemicals. We have proved the capability of the enzyme and filter through modeling and experiment test. Then the water will encounter out fluorescent detection. We pump some water into the detector and mix them with the indicator paper which is coated with modified E.coli, and the EDCs in the water can be captured by our modified E.coli. The E.coli is later excited with laser light to produce fluorescent, the fluorescent signal will be collected and calculated into relative EDCs concentration.

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