Design of a Smart Water Meter Module Integrated on a Traditional Mechanical Meter

Abstract

Smart water metering is one of the important equipment of the smart cities where the information techniques and internet of things are combined and developed. In the field of water measurement, people use smart water meters to collect data remotely, detect fraudulent leaks, and warn of abnormal usage. Most designs use new smart water meters, instead integrated the smart module into old traditional water meters, this waste costs to invest in the new water meters. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a design to integrate a smart wireless remote data module into the mechanical meter bases on the analysis of the traditional commonly mechanical water meter used in Vietnam. For smart water meters, the big problem is the smart water meter module must have low consumption energy. To solve this problem, this paper focuses on analyzing a LC sensor to replace the conventional Hall sensor. In addition, the paper proposed to use a low-power Lora network with high security for data transmission. To verify the proposed method, an experimental setup on Actaris and Itron water meter, where the testing process uses Hall sensor digital conversion technology for Actaris water meter and uses LC sensor for Itron water meter. The data transmission over the Lorawan network is used for both of two experimental setups. The results of both options show that the accuracy implemented in the laboratory is ~99.9%, packet loss rate <5%, RSSI signal loss >-100dBi, SNR noise < 10dB, consumption average energy < 50uA, capable of operating over 4 years with 3.7V/3600mAh battery. These results show that the proposed design is suitable for water meters with a testing cycle according to the terms of utility agencies in Vietnam.