Design and Implementation of an RF Data Communication System

Located just 8 miles northeast of Union College is Ballston Lake, a unique lake, which offers excellent research opportunities for faculty and students. The south basin of the lake is permanently stratified, and there has been no intermixing between water layers for thousands of years. The lower water layers contain no oxygen (anoxic). The Union College Geology Department is interested in a ten year study of Ballston Lake. Currently, there is no commercially available automatic system for collecting and transmitting data from a sensor package at the bottom of the lake to the lake shore and finally to Union College for long-term research purposes. For this project, I have designed and implemented a prototype for an RF data communication system between Ballston Lake and Union College. This system will be used as a part of the long-term water monitoring system for Ballston Lake. The system will allow users to collect and transmit the water property data automatically without having most of the tedious human involvement. In addition, the system will not only offer a large amount of data storage space but also provide a convenient technique to manage and analyze data to help answer numerous questions concerning this fascinating lake. The system design contain both hardware and software components. They both worked together to provide all essential characteristics to perform data transmission reliably between Ballston Lake and Union College. Several possibilities for each hardware component are explored carefully to meet system requirements. In order to communicate reliably between two sites, the Master/Slave protocol is designed and implement. The protocol has been verified working properly with error detection, receiver feedback and retransmission. Several different scenarios of data transmission protocol were tested in order to check the robustness of the protocol

Determination of Gas Emission Characteristics from Animal Wastes Using a Multiplexed Portable FTIR-Surface Chamber System

Livestock production is a growing source of air pollution at regional, national, and global scales. Improved livestock manure management has the potential to reduce environmental impacts; however, there is an urgent need for cost-efficient, reliable, and easy to maintain measurement and monitoring capabilities to precisely quantify emissions from livestock manure. This research describes and evaluates a novel measurement method based on the multiplexed portable Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy analyzer - surface chamber techniques for continuous measurements and monitoring gas emissions from manure sources. The multiplexing system was designed and developed to automate the chamber network, controlling the movement of chambers and accurately managing chamber air flow distribution. The measurement accuracy of the developed system was evaluated under controlled laboratory conditions. The result of the statistical hypothesis testing showed that there is no statistically significant differences among the measurement results from each of the twelve chambers. While microbial activity is a key factor for formation of gaseous compounds in manure, the magnitude of gas exchange between manure and the atmosphere largely depends on manure physical characteristics. A series of soil science measurement and modeling techniques were applied to determine a set of fundamental physical, hydraulics, and thermal properties of cattle manure to support advanced modeling of gas emissions from manure sources. The liquid water retention characteristic for cattle manure was found to be close to that of organic peat soils. The results also suggested that Richards equation can describe the hydrodynamics taking place in cattle manure relevant to natural drying processes. However, the uncertainties of the measurement results could be due to the complexity of shrinkage, surface crust formation, and shrinkage cracks. Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and ammonia (NH3) emissions were estimated and characterized in field plots using the developed gas emission measurement system. The measurements included four treatments; beef manure, dairy manure, beef compost, and dairy compost. The estimated CO2, CH4, and NH3 emissions from the surface application with dairy manure were the highest among other treatments, while those from the surface application with beef compost were the lowest. Impacts of temperature and water content on gaseous emissions were found to be correlated significantly. Overall, this dissertation provides a solid foundation upon which future research can build in better understanding and modeling animal waste emission processes that impact the environment