Internet of Things-based Hydrocarbon Sensing for Real-time Environmental Monitoring

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to address important challenges in our environment, industries, cities, homes and society by collecting, integrating and analysing data from potentially millions of sensors and other internet-connected devices. In this paper we propose a novel IoT-based solution that provides real-time detection of hydrocarbon pollution that can be generated by retail fuel outlets (which are also referred to as service or filling stations). Our solution includes a low-cost but highly accurate fibre optic sensor that can detect hydrocarbons in ground water and can be easily deployed in existing monitoring wells. These hydrocarbon sensors are a key part of an IoT sensor data collection and analysis platform that utilises commercially available sensor nodes to communicate via low power networks (e.g. LORA) to collect and analyse hydrocarbon pollution data in the cloud. This novel IoT platform that combines hydrocarbon sensing with cloud-based data analysis to produce continuously updated hydrocarbon pollution maps and alerts can detect and report hydrocarbon pollution in real-time. The platform could potentially collect hydrocarbon pollution levels from millions of such sensors deployed in thousands of service stations around the world and automatically analyse such data in the cloud to produce continuously and instantaneously updated hydrocarbon pollution maps and related alerts for individual service stations, corporate chains and environmental monitoring agencies.