An electronic integrating heat meter

Abstract

The heat energy consumed by individual customers in a district heating system that uses hot water is found by integrating the flow rate (volume/second) and multiplying it by the temperature difference between the incoming and outgoing water. An electronic integrating heat meter is developed for this purpose using a programmable unijunction transistor (PUT) and linearized thermistor sensors. The temperatures of the incoming and outgoing radiator water are measured by means of the thermistor sensors mounted on the pipes connected to the radiator, and their temperature difference is converted to a current. The current is applied to a current-to-pulse frequency converter using the PUT that operates only during the time of the constant width of the pulses generated by a water-flow meter and correspond to the water-flow volume. Therefore, the number of counted output pulses of the current-to-pulse frequency converter shows the integrated multiplication of the flow rate and the temperature difference, which is the heat energy. The electronic circuit is simple and therefore not expensive. The accuracy of the heat meter is within +or-2% for a temperature difference up to 40 degrees C.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>