Abstract:
Water level monitoring in cargo hold bilges plays a crucial role in maintaining the
operational safety of ships, particularly in preventing waterlogging in the cargo hold.
Field observations revealed that the monitoring system is still manual and not continuous.
This results in potential flooding, cargo damage, local stability disturbances, and
increased operational costs due to emergency handling. This study aims to design and
develop a real-time Internet of Things (IoT)-based water level monitoring device. The
method used is Research and Development (R&D) with stages of design, prototyping,
refinement, testing, and evaluation. The devices used include an ESP32 microcontroller,
a 0.96-inch OLED, a buzzer, and the Blynk application to remotely monitor and control
the device in real-time and provide notifications when the water level reaches a certain
limit. The test results show that the device is capable of detecting changes in water level
at all three water level variations with an average error of 3.68%, although there are still
differences between sensor readings and actual conditions. However, the device can still
provide information quickly and continuously, thus assisting the crew in taking action
before more risky conditions occur. The validation process was conducted by three
experts in the field of nautical and instrument systems, while the practical test involved
20 nautical cadets who had completed sea practice. Thus, it can be concluded that the
designed and developed tool can be an alternative solution in increasing the effectiveness
of water level monitoring in cargo hold bilges. For further development, it is
recommended to periodically calibrate the sensor, add additional sensor features to obtain
more complete data on cargo hold conditions, add data storage features, and develop the
tool so that it can be integrated with the cargo hold bilges pump automatically.
