Methodological Approach for an Online Water Quality Monitoring System in an Iron Ore Tailing Dam

Abstract

Monitoring the concentration of potentially toxic elements (PTEs) in the aquatic ecosystems of the Amazon is critical to guarantee the maintenance of the ecological balance and the life quality of human populations that reside in or use these environments for survival. In this sense, many rivers in the region are dammed to form lakes for depositing mining tailings. Among these, the Gelado Project has the largest iron ore dam in the Amazon that occupies about 13.5 km2 of surface area with 142 million m3 of water and tailings volume, which are currently being mined for exploration, and its upstream waters and downstream are historically used by traditional populations. Based on this, to monitor the impacts of this activity, an online system for sampling and automatic analysis of water quality, composed of three process analyzers monitoring more than 20 parameters, including the PTEs (Cd, Pb, Fe, Mn, Ni, and Cu), was installed downstream of this dam. Therefore, this short communication describes this system’s development, installation, operation, and main advantage over conventional methods.

Keywords

• iron ore dam
• water quality
• potentially toxic elements
• Amazonia
• Serra dos Carajás