Benjamin Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology / Water Quality Sensor Engineering

Advisor: Prof. Kofi Agyemang

Benjamin Nkrumah develops a low-cost electrochemical sensor platform for simultaneous field measurement of pH, nitrate, phosphate, and total dissolved solids in Ghana's drinking water distribution networks. At KNUST's Chemical Engineering department, supervised by Prof. Kofi Agyemang, he has fabricated screen-printed carbon paste electrodes modified with selective ionophore membranes and integrated them into a PDMS microfluidic chip the size of a credit card. A LoRa-connected microcontroller logs readings to a cloud dashboard every 30 minutes, enabling utilities to detect contamination events hours before they reach conventional grab-sampling detection windows. Benjamin validated his platform across 47 sampling points in Kumasi's peri-urban water network against laboratory ICP-OES reference measurements, achieving relative errors below 8% for all four analytes. Ghana Water Company Ltd has agreed to a 90-day pilot deployment covering 120 sensors across Kumasi, representing the first large-scale operational trial of a locally designed water quality IoT network in West Africa. His active job applications to hardware engineering roles at water technology companies and his forthcoming conference presentation indicate strong industry intent.