MEMS-Based Smart Gas Metering for Internet of Things

Abstract

Utilities have traditionally employed or contracted meter readers to collect natural gas usage data, which is expensive and time consuming, and thus necessitates the need of smart natural gas metering. Existing gas metering systems mainly focus on measuring the amount of gas flowing through an microelectro mechanical system (MEMS) thermal gas flow sensor and simply ignore the detailed gas composition. From computational fluid mechanics simulations, however, we discover that gases with different compositions will cause different effects on the reading of an MEMS sensor. Based on a thorough analysis of the working principle of MEMS thermal gas flow sensor, we propose an innovative mechanism to compensate the errors caused by different types of natural gases on the sensor’s reading. The proposed solution first measures the physical property of metered gas to derive the composition correction coefficient that will then be used to correct the meter’s reading errors, considering the relation between the calorific value and physical property of natural gases. In this way, the proposed solution realizes a real-time multicomposition gas metering via thermal gas flow sensors. We implement and evaluate the proposed gas metering technique in various Internet of Things systems, including industrial flow metering, gas metering in smart home, and gas metering in low-power wide-area networks. Experiment results verify the innovative design and confirm that the proposed solution features high sensitivity, high precision, and high range ratio.