Low-cost Oceanographic Buoy for Evaluating the Mechanical Resistance of a Water Cherenkov Detector to be deployed on a high-altitude Natural Lake in Peru.

Abstract

The SWGO Collaboration is evaluating the possibility of deploying Water Cherenkov Detectors (WCD) in a high-altitude natural lake. For that, the first challenge is to build a bladder strong enough that could be used as a WCD inside a natural lake. A prototype bladder has been designed for SWGO and two bladders, made of different films, have been deployed for testing at Sibinacocha lake, in Peru, at 5000 masl. In order to monitor the wave intensity in the lake, a low-cost oceanographic buoy was developed using an acceleration sensor MPU6050 and a liquid sensor DS18B20. The development platform used was the Arduino Mega 2560 with some out-of-the shelf modules to achieve a functional and autonomous prototype. A code was developed in Python to process the data and convert the acceleration values into position, allowing estimation of height variations, as a function of time, less than 1 cm. To reduce the environmental impact of the floating structure, the use of metallic materials was minimized and mostly wood, cotton, and PVC pipes were used. This buoy has been installed next to SWGO prototype bladders at the Sibinacocha lake in Peru. In this contribution we will present the details of a low-cost oceanographic buoy built to monitor lake wave intensity.