Engineering has the biggest role to play in making fundamental societal change – this is the motivation of the team at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Department of Electrical Engineering as they embark on a new project that aims to locate and monitor ocean pollution in waters off Cape Town.
Lead by Professor Amit Kumar Mishra as the principal investigator – along with Associate Professor Fred Nicolls, senior lecturer Robyn Verrinder and lecturers Jarryd Son and Stephen Paine – the team will soon undertake Project SMARTPOL, a new venture that will identify sources of pollution in our waters through methods never seen before.
They aim to use a combination of boats, sensors and satellites to collect data to find ocean pollution.
Mishra said: “We are planning to have two major ways of monitoring: an unmanned boat – to which we will fit sensors – to navigate coastal areas in a continuous manner and send us data; then we are also planning to use remote sensors for the detection of pollutants in coastal water. We are especially planning to work on radar satellites; radar images are good at detecting pollution like oil spills. There are cases where people take waste oil on a yacht and just dump it in the ocean. They think that nobody is watching. With the remote sensor radar images, we can detect the oil streaks.”
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