Temperature Water Proofing Experiment

The field site at Lyon Arboretum is a wet place! With an annual average of 165 inches of rainfall we have to ensure that all the equipment for the experiment up at Lyon is water tight! We created two designs for the temperature sensor waterproofing, one was the "overkill" option with heat shrink wrap around the sensor plate itself and then waterproofing "goo" smeared along the entire plate and seals and allowed to dry. Then the entire senor is wrapped again in heat shrink wrap and the seals are sealed with "goo".

The second option is the more efficient option with adhesive heat shirk wrap over the sensor and and heat gunned to seal it to the sensor plate. Both sensors were then placed in a saltwater bath for several weeks and data was collected off their readings to make sure they did not fail. Saltwater was used because it is corrosive and represents the harshest environment that these sensors could be subjected to. In short if there was even a tiny leak problem with these designs the saltwater bath would show it!

Figure 1: The temperature probes in the saltwater bath.

Figure 2: Design 1 of the temperature probe waterproofing design, with just the heat shrink tubing. The "efficient" design

Figure 3: The second design for the temperature probes with the "goo" and heat shrink tubing and wrap. The "overkill" design

Figure 4: The python code for the temperature probes. If there was a leak the temperature probes would stop reporting a value back to the code.

Overall both sensors survived the saltwater bath. The "efficient" design was chosen as the final design because of its simplicity and overall use of less resources and time. All the sensors for this project will be subjected to the saltwater bath test to ensure that they can survive the field sampling before they are deployed