Early this year, an automatic water quality buoy on coastal waters created by the Da Nang-headquartered Smart and Innovation Technology Joint Stock Company (Sitech) made its debut.  It’s worth noticing that this product’s price is only about 20% of that set on imported ones with similar features.

A view of the Sitech-developed automatic water quality buoy on coastal waters

Sitech’s Director Pham Kim Son said, the quality of sea water at our beaches is usually measured every 3 - 6 months from seawater sampling carried out. However, this does not help monitor the quality of coastal waters continuously, whilst foreign automatic monitoring products are highly expensive and cost-consuming in their installation and maintenance work. This fact has promoted Sitech's engineers to come up with the idea of creating an automatic water quality buoy on coastal waters for the domestic consumption target.

The Sitech-developed, 4m-high, yellow-painted buoy consists of an automatic sensor cleaning device, a dta collector incorporating a reading sensor with a microprocessor, a solar battery system, and an anti-theft alarm.

All recorded parameters are transmitted to management software via 3G, 4G, GPRS or SMS connections. The software, which is built as a web page that can display data in the form of tables, charts, maps or Excel files, can give an alarm in case of a parameter exceeding the already-set limits.

Director Son said the biggest challenge in the design of this buoy is to mull over how to ensure it can float vertically, especially it can be able to withstand higher waves averaging 3–4 m.  Eventually, Sitech's engineers succeeded in calculating hydrodynamic factors for a mechanical balance in order to prevent the buoy from floating upside down.

The Sitech-developed buoy has gone to sale at a price of about 1 - 1.2 billion VND, much lower than the figure of 7-10 billion VND priced for imported one with the same functions. 

This product was granted an industrial design patent by the National Office of Intellectual Property under the Ministry of Science and Technology in early July. Besides, Sitech company has recently been recognised as a science and technology enterprise by the Da Nang government. 

Currently, Sitech is creating more automatic water quality buoys on coastal waters for future consumption in Da Nang and many other cities and provinces across the country such as Ho Chi Minh City and Quang Ngai Province.

By PHONG LAN – Translated by A.T