Designing remote web-based mechanical-volumetric flow meter reading systems based on renewable energies

Abstract

Today, in water and wastewater industry a lot of mechanical-volumetric flow meters are used for the navigation of the produced water and the data of these flow meters, due to use in a wide geographical range, is done physically and by in person presence. All this makes reading the data costly and, in some cases, due to the rugged topography, there is no possibility to get the data at a specific period. Since water and wastewater companies produce water and knowing the amount of water produced is one of the important components in short and long-term planning, the purpose of this project is obtaining the data from mechanical counter meters and sending data online over the Internet. The project challenges include the lack of electricity in the installation place of water meters, the existence of mechanical counters, and the quality of sending data to the web-based central server. The reasons to work on these flow meters are the high number of meters in the country, about 3.5 million meters, which makes the project economically justifiable, low price of mechanical-volumetric meters compared to ultrasonic and magnetic ones, domestic production of these meters, and convenience after-sales service in supplying components, and acceptable accuracy. Replacing these meters with similar ultrasonic and magnetic ones imposes a lot of costs to water and wastewater companies, which is inaccessible according to their current budgets.

Conducting this project empowers water and wastewater companies in efficient use of resources, so that in this project once a sudden increase in consumption is spotted an alarm goes off in web based software, announcing the possible fractures in transmission lines and prevents water loss and other damage and also provides the ability to control and manage consumption. In this project, it is planned so that by using renewable energy sources, electricity needed for the device is supplied, and the existing infrastructure of the telecommunications is used in data transmission.

Keywords: mechanical meter; readrealay sensor; ARM; RTU;and GSM microcontroller