Advanced sensors and instrumentation: A project based paper with emphasis on remote environmental parameters measurement

Sensors and instrumentation play an important role to improve the lifestyle of people and their surroundings. The IEEE IMS Faculty Course Development Award supports and encourages faculty members to develop a new course or significantly revise existing accredited engineering/physics/science curricula with specific focus on instrumentation and/or measurement. The Faculty Course Development Award 2013 provided funding that helped to develop this paper named "Advanced Sensors and Instrumentation" with a special emphasis on measurement of remote environmental parameters at Massey University, New Zealand. (In New Zealand, we call classes a paper, not a course. For example, in the Bachelor degree program, each year we have eight papers and the students need to do thirty-two papers for the degree. The "course" means the complete program.) The objectives are to provide an overview of the importance of environmental monitoring; to have students develop necessary skills to select appropriate sensors and develop the associated signal conditioning to monitor important environmental parameters; to train the students/engineers on the best methods to transmit, store, analyze, and interpret the data from the sensors; and to provide a hands-on experience in electronic system design concepts, particularly for environmental monitoring. Engineering students will gain knowledge to take up the challenges to design, fabricate and implement sensing systems and necessary instrumentation circuits for monitoring the environment. The content of the paper has been presented at other universities, and the materials are available for any faculty to use in their own teaching.