Image Sensors Measure Water and Oil Quality

Image sensors find use in quite unusual decices such as water quality meter and oil breakdown meter:

Theelec: Pixelplus develops a sensor for water quality measurement with Thewavetalk. Water quality measurement devices use lasers to measure whether there are unwanted particles inside the liquid. Pixelplus is developing a 3 level stacked chip that combines an image sensor, a water quality signal processor and a memory.

University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, publish an MDPI paper "Characterization of Dielectric Oil with a Low-Cost CMOS Imaging Sensor and a New Electric Permittivity Matrix Using the 3D Cell Method" by José Miguel Monzón-Verona, Pablo Ignacio González-Domínguez, Santiago García-Alonso, and Jenifer Vaswani Reboso.

"In this paper, a new method for characterizing the dielectric breakdown voltage of dielectric oils is presented, based on the IEC 60156 international standard. In this standard, the effective value of the dielectric breakdown voltage is obtained, but information is not provided on the distribution of Kelvin forces an instant before the dynamic behavior of the arc begins or the state of the gases that are produced an instant after the moment of appearance of the electric arc in the oil. In this paper, the behavior of the oil before and after the appearance of the electric arc is characterized by combining a low-cost CMOS imaging sensor and a new matrix of electrical permittivity associated with the dielectric oil, using the 3D cell method. In this way, we also predict the electric field before and after the electric rupture. The error compared to the finite element method is less than 0.36%. In addition, a new method is proposed to measure the kinematic viscosity of dielectric oils."