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Scientists use Windmill Software to Locate Oil Contamination

When underground water is contaminated by oil, environmental agencies need to find the source and extent of the pollution. Traditionally this has been difficult to establish, but researchers at the University of Waterloo (Canada) are working on an answer.

The scientists inject a solution of bromide and other tracer chemicals into the water. When these tracers hit the contamination, some are retarded more than others. Downstream, the team continuously pump up the groundwater and monitor the tracers. The differences in breakthrough times of each tracer lets them estimate the total mass and distribution of the subsurface oil pools.

To accurately measure the breakthrough of bromide they use Windmill Software with an Orion 290 A+ meter equipped with a bromide selective electrode. Dr Niels Hartog, one of the scientists involved in the project, commented...

"With Windmill reading the serial output of the meter, I was easily able to continuously log bromide concentrations in the extraction wells."

Windmill stores the data in a text file which can later be imported into almost any Windows analysis software, such as Excel. The handheld Orion meter, for performing pH and concentration measurements, is just one of the many devices which can be handled by the Windmill data acquisition software.

In time, results from the tracer test will be presented at Dr Hartog's web site: http://science.uwaterloo.ca/~nhartog/current.htm

The Windmill software used in this study is free to our Monitor newsletter subscribers. An updated version of the serial driver, called COMIML, is also available. Click here for more details and a free setup trial.

To quickly configure the Windmill 4.3 software for use with the Orion meter go to http://www.windmill.co.uk/library.html and download the set-up files. If you prefer to configure the software by hand, or are using Windmill 6, here are some typical settings. They assume the meter is set to print the reading every 5 seconds and Windmill is running in continuous flow mode.

Settings:
Timeout                 5000
Instrument Idle Time    400
Data Persistence        5000
Returned Message Length 60
Channels:
Prompt String           \C027P 
Reply Parse String      \S"+"\E"g"