UWI students make strides in pollution fight

It is a combination of new school electronics and old-fashioned friendship that almost visibly adjoins Anthony Drummonds, Stefan Watson and Vincent Taylor, proving that it does not have always have to be out with the old and in with the new.

The young men, final-year computer-science students at the University of the West Indies, Mona, are making their mark in the field of electronics.

As a requirement for their final-year electronics project, they were given real problem situations by their lecturers and had to create an electronic device to solve the problem.

Drummonds and Watson along with Sasha-Gaye Dixon, a third-year electronics student who the young men insisted played an integral part in the research, created the Pollution, Detection, Monitoring System. The system was created out of an attempt to respond to frequent fish kills in the Black River in St Elizabeth.

The residents of Black River, a large-scale fish-farming community, complained that dead fish are often seen floating in the river.

"There were complaints that it was the dunder, a by-product of sugar cane, that runs into the Black River from the two sugar-cane factories that caused the fish to die," Watson said.

He added: "We designed a system that will detect the pH of water because contamination in a body of water would change the pH of the water, whether it be organic, chemical or any other pollutant, our system determines whether the water is polluted or not."

Drummonds, the self-proclaimed leader of the group, explained how the model worked:

"The device has pH sensors that senses the pH in the water, whenever it detects it, it transmits the data wirelessly for radio frequencies to a remote location where persons will view it on a monitor. If there is a decrease in the pH, they will be alerted to that, so they can respond adequately," Drummonds said.

The students say they plan to make their project available to the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) which has responsibility to monitor the environment.

"The problem that NEPA had was that by the time residents reported the dead fish and by the time they would carry out tests on the dead fish and the water, the pollutants were already diluted, dissipated ... . Our system detects, adequately detects, the changes ," Watson claimed.

Meanwhile, Taylor, who created the Remote Weather Pad that monitors environmental conditions is equally excited about his research.

"The device is capable of monitoring a range of environmental conditions that can transmit that data back to a base station," he said.

As he proudly fixed his eyes on his device, he further explained:

"The pad used an existing cellular network to transmit the data in contrast to commercial weather solutions that use the Internet and other expensive methods of communication. It is ideal for Jamaica where you don't have a solid Internet infrastructure, but where you have a wide spread of cellular coverage."

Taylor added that the device is self- sustainable as it is powered by a solar panel and would only cost US$100.

Meanwhile, Dr Leary Myers, lecturer in the Department of Physics at the university and the supervisor for Drummonds and Watson, explained that the main idea for assigning the projects to the students was to allow them to put to use all the knowledge they had gathered from the university.

"Employing what you have learnt at the university to solve a problem is what electronics is all about," he said.

Leonardo Clarke, also a lecturer in the Department of Physics at the university and the supervisor for Taylor, was pleased with Taylor's device.

" I am proud of him. The project that he got could have been given to two students. He got the highest mark in the class," Clarke said.

Both devices will be on display today at UWI's research day.

- Dania McKenzie