The Technical Gap of Online Water Quality Inspection at Home and Abroad

In China, since the main markets for online water quality analyzer, including industrial water treatment process monitoring and control, municipal tap water and sewage treatment, and automatic environmental monitoring, start late compared to major developed countries such as Europe, America and Japan. At the same time, it is also because the basic technologies such as electronic technology, automatic control, software and precision manufacturing industries that support the R&D and manufacture of water quality online analysis instruments have only begun to develop in China in just a few decades after the reform and opening up. These two reasons have caused the gap in the development of China's water quality online analysis equipment and detection technology.

Like other analytical instrument products, reliability is the biggest gap between domestic and foreign online water quality analyzers. The lack of specialized talents caused the backward design concepts and processes, the stability and supply of key components, and the differences in the manufacturing level and quality management level of the online water quality analyzer industry are all reasons for the reliability gap.

Another gap between the on-line water quality detection technology at home and abroad is the innovation of analysis principle. Compared with the new analytical principles, new materials, new algorithms and other new technologies continuously applied by counterparts in developed countries, the current main principles of China's water quality online testing instruments are still based on traditional electrochemistry and colorimetry. The adaptability of the instrument to changes in water quality cannot fully meet the requirements of current process control in the water treatment industry.

In the cognition and application of green analysis, there is a certain gap between domestic and foreign water quality online analysis technology. The requirements of green analysis are to reduce the impact of multiple environments in the analysis process, avoid (or substantially reduce) the use of chemical reagents, reduce the generation of gas, liquid and solid wastes, avoid the use of highly toxic (including eco-toxic) reagents, and reduce the manpower and energy consumption required for sample analysis. At present, domestic online water quality analyzers, especially monitoring-type online water quality analyzers with a more complicated structure, still have a certain gap with foreign advanced instruments in terms of reagent usage, waste liquid production, and toxic reagent usage and energy consumption.

In the past ten years or so, under the vigorous promotion of the environmental monitoring technical route of "automatic monitoring as the mainstay and manual monitoring as the supplementary monitoring mode", China's monitoring water quality online analysis instrument technology has made considerable progress and development. Since 2002, tens of thousands of online water quality analyzers and systems have been installed, debugged and actually operated almost every year. A large number of R&D, manufacturing and practical applications of the instrument provide and accumulate valuable experience for the technological progress of the industry. At the same time, China has released dozens of national and industry standards for online water quality analyzers and systems. The release and implementation of these standards have greatly promoted the application and development of online water quality analyzers in the Chinese market. It strongly supports the development of China's monitoring-type online water quality analyzer development and manufacturing technology, and a variety of application technologies that adapt to different water quality conditions have also been developed. China has made great progress in monitoring online water quality analyzers. In general, the conventional online water quality analyzer and its application technology for automatic monitoring of water pollution source discharge and water environment have reached the international leading level.