A light-weight Electromagnetic Based Embedded Sensing System For Ground Water Exploration

The availability of usable groundwater is fast becoming one of the most important environmental issues today. Though the availability of groundwater differs from place to place and more often the demand tends to overcome the supply. In spite of the numerous dowsing techniques that exists in the market today; till date there has been little work done in UAV based sensing, and so the thesis has been carried out with the collaboration of the start-up company SkyDowser, whose primary focus was on the emerging area of UAV based geophysical surveying. In this thesis project, research was firstly conducted on current and previous surveying methodologies. After which research was done to obtain a basic working understanding of various geophysical concepts, electromagnetics etc. Simulations were then carried out using the AIRBEOforward modelling software which was helpful to understand geophysical surveysystems: what was to be expected from such a system, what influenced the response etc. The initial top-level design of a Light-weight Electromagnetic Based Embedded Sensing System for Ground Water Exploration follows after that. Finally a 3-coil based analog sensor prototype has been implemented, different measurements have been taken and various results have been tabulated