Contaminated water does not only affect human beings, but the life of aquatic
species also relies on clean water. Critical parameters such as dissolved
oxygen (DO), the potential of hydrogen (pH), ammonia, nitrate and also
temperature must be observed. Ammonia is toxic to fish and can be damaging
to any fish production system. This paper presents three types of planar
interdigital sensors that have been fabricated and developed for the aim of
the aquaculture monitoring process. The objectives of this study are to
develop and to characterize a sensor suitable for ammonia detection for
aquaculture application; to evaluate the effectiveness of the sensor to detect
the ammonia level in the water and also to develop a low cost ammonia
sensor. There are several experiments conducted on these planar interdigital
sensors to recognize which sensor produces a better sensitivity. These planar
interdigital sensors are designed with the same number of positive electrodes
but different numbers of negative electrodes. The experiment was carried out
by using Impedance Analyzer IM3570 to obtain the data and NI myRIO-1900
was used to monitor the sensor application. Wheatstone bridge was used as
signal conditioning to interface between the sensor and NI myRIO-1900.
Graphical User Interface (GUI), programmed using LabVIEW was
developed to interface between the hardware and the software parts. Results
show that Sensor 1 has the best sensitivity compared to other sensors.