Automatic Meter Research Articles

Does Automation Help Operations?

This month's question concerns the benefits of using supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and automatic meter reading (AMR) systems, especially for a small water system. The article suggests first deciding what the automation process needs to do, and then work with a designer to develop a SCADA or AMR system that suits your present needs and can also grow as your requirements change. Topics discussed include: regulatory and operational requirements; training; alarms and advantages; tracking data; collecting operational information; generating reports and graphs; security benefits; and, power savings.

Configuring and managing a large‐scale monitoring network: solving real world challenges for ultra‐low‐powered and long‐range wireless mesh networks

AbstractIn creating wireless networking solutions suitable for deployment in harsh, unpredictable and widespread environments, we were confronted with a series of problems as yet unsolved by commercially available technologies. The purpose of this article is to describe how we addressed mission‐critical customer requirements by developing a wireless technology explicitly for devices in ultra‐low‐power (ULP) and long‐range wireless mesh networks. The key end‐points in our target implementation are battery‐operated devices located in hard‐to‐reach places, but which are nonetheless expected to offer a lifespan of several years without human intervention. We provide an overview of the technical requirements for building ULP networks, with a focus on configuration and management (including patent pending self‐configuration and dynamic‐routing features). This is followed by a case study of an existing 25,000‐node wireless network deployed for an automatic meter reading (AMR) solution, and examples of provisioning individual nodes in complex real‐world networks. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Roper Industries, Inc (New)

AbstractIndustrial Machinery and Equipment (MIC: 11.5 SIC: 3561 NAIC:333911)Roper Industries is a diversified industrial company. The Instrumentation segment provides equipment and consumables for material analysis, fluid properties testing and industrial leak testing. The industrial technology segment produces industrial pumps, flow measurement and metering equipment, and water meter and automatic meter reading products and systems. The Energy Systems and Controls segment produces control systems, machinery vibration and other non‐destructive inspection and measurement products. The Scientific and Industrial Imaging segment produces high‐performance digital imaging products and software and handheld computers and software.

Roper Industries, Inc (NEW)

Mergent's Dividend AchieversVolume 2, Issue 2 p. 237-237 U.S. Company Report Roper Industries, Inc (NEW)† First published: 22 April 2005 https://doi.org/10.1002/div.2408 † Contact: : Brian D. Jellison — Chmn., Pres., C.E.O. Address: : 2160 Satellite Boulevard, Suite 200, Duluth, GA 30097 Web Site: : www.roperind.com AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Industrial Machinery and Equipment (MIC: 11.5 SIC: 561 NAIC: 33911) Roper Industries is a diversified industrial company. The Instrumentation segment provides equipment and consumables for material analysis, fluid properties testing and industrial leak testing. The industrial technology segment produces industrial pumps, flow measurement and metering equipment, and water meter and automatic meter reading products and systems. The Energy Systems and Controls segment produces control systems, machinery vibration and other non-destructive inspection and measurement products. The Scientific and Industrial Imaging segment produces high-performance digital imaging products and software and handheld computers and software. Volume2, Issue2Spring 2005Pages 237-237 RelatedInformation

Optimization of the water chemistry of the primary coolant at nuclear power plants with VV�R

Results of the use of automatic hydrogen-content meter for controlling the parameter of “hydrogen” in the primary coolant circuit of the Kola nuclear power plant are presented. It is shown that the correlation between the “hydrogen” parameter in the coolant and the “hydrazine” parameter in the makeup water can be used for controlling the water chemistry of the primary coolant system, which should make it possible to optimize the water chemistry at different power levels

Urban utilities warm up to the idea of wireless automatic meter reading

While Italy's ENEL SpA heralds in the new world of automatic meter reading, the colossal utility service provider is not alone in this massive endeavour. Literally hundreds of AMR projects are being deployed worldwide from as far away as Australia and Argentina to as close as Germany and Greece. The advent of deregulation in the utility market and the technological advances in control communications has made it possible for utility service providers all over the world to take advantage of the benefits of AMR. In addition to automated meter reading, AMR systems enable load balancing and distribution, rapid identification of power faults, and remote service activation or deactivation. An AMR system can save a utility service provider million of euros per year in efficiency and maintenance fees. The key to successful wireless AMR deployment is to carefully consider the wireless technology and to put into place a long-lasting, intelligent system that meet the challenges of the residential urban metering environment by addressing interference and data reliability, and by providing long battery life.

A Solution to Remote Detection of Illegal Electricity Usage via Power Line Communications

Power line communications (PLC) presents an interesting and economical solution for automatic meter reading (AMR). If an AMR system via PLC is set in a power delivery system, a detection system for illegal electricity usage may be easily added in the existing PLC network. In the detection system, the second digitally energy meter chip is used and the value of energy is stored. The recorded energy is compared with the value at the main kilowatthour meter. In the case of the difference between two recorded energy data, an error signal is generated and transmitted via PLC network. The detector and control system is proposed. The architecture of the system and their critical components are given. The measurement results obtained from Turkey's power lines are given. This paper describes a prototype of the detector system for illegal electricity usage using the power lines. The target of this study is to discover new and possible solutions for the lack of literature concerning this problem.

Roper Industries, Inc (New)

AbstractIndustrial Machinery and Equipment (MIC: 11.5 SIC: 3561 NAIC:333911)Roper Industries is a diversified industrial company. The Instrumentation segment provides equipment and consumables for material analysis, fluid properties testing and industrial leak testing. The industrial technology segment produces industrial pumps, flow measurement and metering equipment, and water meter and automatic meter reading products and systems. The Energy Systems and Controls segment produces control systems, machinery vibration and other non‐destructive inspection and measurement products. The Scientific and Industrial Imaging segment produces high‐performance digital imaging products and software and handheld computers and software.

Current and Future of the Networked Sensing Systems #4: Recent Trends in Automatic Meter Reading and its Customer Service Applications

Current and Future of the Networked Sensing Systems #4: Recent Trends in Automatic Meter Reading and its Customer Service Applications

Wireless energy

Automatic meter reading breaks free from its wires. The new solid-state power meters that replaced the traditional co-webbed electromechanical meters are packing much more power. These meters, along with millions of others across Europe, can send daily power use information to service providers hundreds of miles away. What's more, utilities companies can use the devices to remotely turn power off or on at a residence, identify and isolate power faults and even balance and distribute loads. Long gone are the days of going into the backyards of homes to record meter data or driving a meter van to collect RIF pulses of data from residential meters. This is the age of AMR. These systems also enable load balancing and distribution, rapid identification of faults, and remote service activation or deactivation.

AMR: It's More Than Just Data Collection

This article describes how the north Texas town of McKinney installed automatic meter reading (AMR) technology in order to more efficiently manage its water distribution, reduce overhead costs, and improve meter‐reading efficiency. The article discusses how the AMR system has become a key management tool used for dispute resolution, leak detection, conservation monitoring, regulation enforcement, and documenting proper meter deployment.

Influence of the transmission medium quality on the automatic meter reading system capacity

This article determines the influence of the telecommunication transmission medium's quality, expressed by the probability of failed single-try transmission, on the capacity of the automatic meter reading system. Failed message transmission leads to the necessity of retransmission, with possible multiple retransmissions. This causes the prolongation of average time required for collecting the information from the great population of meters, reducing the capacity of reading expressed in meters per hour being read. This work continues the analysis published by S. Mak et al. (1995), but also expands it by including the influence of the transport medium's limited quality. In the automatic meter reading systems, one can use networks with radio relays and power line carrier (PLC)-based devices. Our analysis is partly based on the assumption that the PLC medium has much lower quality than the radio, causing most of the transmission errors occur on the PLC itself. The result of the analysis is the processing prolongation factor g, which depends on the statistic parameter of single-try retransmission probability only. This kind of model enables the explanation of disproportion amongst the local probabilities of retransmission and the general probability observed in the entire network, as recognized and documented by L. Selander (1999) . In the end, we determine the automatic system's reading capacity limit.

Substation integration pilot project

The Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) has been automating its power system operations and corporate business procedures for some time. OPPD is a medium-sized electric utility of approximately 2400 employees, 302000 electric customers, and a 2000 MW system peak load. Traditionally, departments have automated their own systems, creating islands of information. Therefore, a need to integrate systems to make information available at the corporate level required consideration. In 2000, an OPPD Automation Plan was initiated to coordinate and integrate systems on a corporate-wide basis. As a result of this plan, initiatives were recommended for a new energy management system (EMS), automatic meter reading, mobile computing, distribution automation (DA), and substation automation (SA). In June 2000, a consultant was hired to assist in developing a substation automation plan and to assist in implementing the Utility Communications Architecture (UCA) in the plan for a pilot project. This article addresses this pilot project, including its objectives, overview, issues, and evaluation.

Effect of genome composition and cytoplasm on petal colour in resynthesized amphidiploids and sesquidiploids derived from crosses between Brassica rapa and Brassica oleracea

AbstractThe effect of genome composition and cytoplasm on petal colour was studied in Brassica. Three accessions of yellow‐petalled B. rapa (2n= 20, AA) were crossed with a white‐petalled B. oleracea var. alboglabra (2n= 18, CC) and with three cream‐yellow‐petalled B. oleracea var. gongylodes (2n= 18, CC) to produce resynthesized B. napus (2n= 38, AACC or CCAA) and sesquidiploids (2n= 29, AAC or CAA). Petal colour was measured with a Hunter automatic colour difference meter. The results revealed that petal colour in Brassica is controlled by nuclear genes and by cytoplasmic factors. Additive and epistatic gene effects were involved in the action of nuclear genes. When crosses were made between yellow‐petalled B. rapa and white‐petalled B. oleracea var. alboglabra, significant additive, epistatic and cytoplasmic effects were found. White petal colour was partially epistatic over yellow petal colour. When crosses were made between yellow‐petalled B. rapa and cream‐yellow‐petalled B. oleracea var. gongylodes, only epistatic effects were detected. Yellow petal colour was epistatic over cream‐yellow.

Assessment of ambient dose equivalent rate: performance of an automatic survey meter as an instrument to quantify the presence of radiation in soils

Those who work in radiation protection are faced with various quantities that were created to account for the effects of ionizing radiation in the human body. As far as the experimental point of view is concerned, each available equipment is planned to measure a distinct quantity, for a specific radiation protection application, and it is not always clear which one it is. This paper shows a series of tests, planned and applied to a portable gamma ray spectrometer, in order to assure that the monitoring low dose levels of radiation with it is reliable. The equipment is fully automated and does not allow modifications of the conversion factors from counts to ambient dose equivalent. It is therefore necessary to assure that the values provided by the equipment are correct and refer to the actual situation one expects to find in practice. The system is based on an NaI(Tl) scintillation detector, mounted with its electronics in a portable case, suitable for field measurements. It measures ambient dose equivalent rate (Ḣ*(10) in Sv h−1), total counts in the spectrum (from 50 to 1670 keV) and number of counts per channel (128 channels). The tests presented here are: evaluation of the cosmic component, repeatability, check against standard extended sources, and performance with point sources (60Co or 137Cs) on the ground. The results show that the system can be used, with its built-in conversion coefficients, for in situ measurements, whether or not the ground contains only natural radiation or is additionally contaminated.

Electric Interval Data on the Web: The Value Pyramid from AMR to Risk Management

ABSTRACT Meter interval data posted on the web has a pyramid of value. At the top of the pyramid is real time interval data used to support energy trading where millions of dollars in energy contracts are at risk. At the bottom of the pyramid is automatic meter reading [AMR] which has a value of about one dollar per month per account. Between the top and bottom are applications targeted to commercial and industrial users who need data for optimizing use and aggregating purchases. Energy and service suppliers have the opportunity to raise their sights above AMR and offer their C&I customers many real time interval based services offering higher returns in the pyramid of value.

Outage Management through AMR Systems Using an Intelligent Data Filter

Automatic meter reading (AMR) is the remote collection of consumption data from customers' utility meters over telecommunication, radio, power line, and other links. Electric utilities are exploring the usage of AMR data for outage management for distribution systems. Signals from automated meters can provide additional information in the outage detection and determination processes as well as restoration phases of outage management. Due to its low quality, however, AMR outage data cannot be fed directly into outage management systems. This paper details the development of an intelligent information filter for automated metering systems. The filter prevents false outage notifications in addition to improving the quality of outage data. The nature of wireless communication in the AMR system introduces uncertainty issues in the query process. This uncertainty has been modeled using probabilistic and fuzzy engineering techniques. The filter has also been tested using historical outage data.

Multiprotocol routing for automatic remote meter reading using power line carrier systems

This paper addresses the potential applications of multi-protocol routing for automatic remote meter reading (ARMR). The paper concentrates on the special needs for these applications over the lower line, in terms of: the data on a lower line medium; transmitting and receiving data from any point on the low voltage distribution network; achieving reliable communications from any point on the low voltage distribution network to any other internal and external point; and the ability to increase system performance. Other communications media such as radio and telephone line are not ignored. The intention is to seek out a protocol or multiprotocol routing architecture, which could be used for power line carrier systems but equally could also he applied to these other media for the communication of metering data, and other services.

Outage management through AMR systems using an intelligent data filter

Automatic meter reading (AMR) is the remote collection of consumption data from customers' utility meters over telecommunication, radio, power-line and other links. Electric utilities are exploring the usage of AMR data for outage management for distribution systems. Signals from automated meters can provide additional information in the outage detection and determination processes as well as restoration phases of outage management. However due to its low quality, AMR outage data cannot be fed directly into outage management systems. This paper details the development of an intelligent information filter for automated metering systems. The filter prevents false outage notifications in addition to improving the quality of outage data. The nature of wireless communication in the AMR system introduces uncertainty issues in the query process. This uncertainty has been modeled using probabilistic and fuzzy engineering techniques. The filter has also been tested using historical outage data.

Control of a Batch Dyeing Process with Three Acid Dyes

The process of dyeing of nylon with tertiary acid dye mixtures is controlled by automatic metering of dyes and chemicals. Closed-loop control is achieved by real-time data acquisition of the dyebath conditions coupled with a feedback control strategy. The objective of controlled dyeing is to obtain an on-tone build-up of shade using three monosulfonated acid dyes in mixture combinations. Computerized dosing pumps control the pH, the dyebath concentrations of the individual dyes, and the total sorption of each dye during the process. Photographs of yarn cross sections examined under the polarizing microscope reveal uniform penetration of dye in the individual fibers of the yarns. Color matching of samples dyed under identical dyeing conditions shows good shade reproducibility. It is also possible to re-use a dyebath of residual dyes and chemicals from a previous dyeing. Thus, good shade reproducibility and uniform shade build-up can be achieved in a laboratory dyeing machine by adopting real-time closed-loop control.