Energy Autonomous Wireless Water Meter with Integrated Turbine Driven Energy Harvester

13th International Conference on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications

物理学;能源学

Becker, P.^1 ; Folkmer, B.^1 ; Goepfert, R.^1 ; Hoffmann, D.^1 ; Willmann, A.^1 ; Manoli, Y.^1,2

HSG-IMIT Institute of Micromachining and Information Technology, Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany^1

Fritz Huettinger Department of Microelectronics, Department of Microsystems Engineering IMTEK, University of Freiburg, Germany^2

关键词: Accurate recording;    Customer dissatisfaction;    Energy requirements;    European Standards;    Integrated turbines;    Secure data transmissions;    Voltage amplitude;    Water metering systems;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/476/1/012046/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/476/1/012046

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

Accurate meter reading is the fundamental task of the home water system for the handling of payments. Meters need to be read correctly, to avoid an effect of adding events that increase unnecessary cost and create customer dissatisfaction. This paper presents a fully integrated wireless, energy autonomous water metering system based on the European Standard EN 13757 "Communication systems for meters and remote reading of meters". The system can be used in multiple water metering scenarios. No maintenance will be required and the system will provide precise and secure data transmission as well as timely and accurate recording of the consumption of water. The identification of any leakages will be improved through the analysis of the actual quantity supplied and recorded by the meters. The system is powered by an energy harvester, based on a water driven turbine wheel that is directly coupled to an electromagnetic energy transducer. The power delivered by the generator is dependent of the amount of flowing water and the pressure in the water pipes. Therefor the power is commonly non-continuous, fluctuant and unstable in the voltage amplitude. To be able to report the meter readings at all times, the system needs to be powered not only in times when the energy harvester delivers energy. Therefor an energy buffer, that stores the harvested energy, is installed to compensate the energy requirement between the actual generator output and the energy consumption of the application. Besides a complete system overview, the presentation will focus on the power management and energy aware battery charging circuitry. The design, fabrication, measuring results and the preparations for field tests in rural and urban environment will be presented and discussed.