Embedded Sensor Prototype for Monitoring Water Flow
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2016
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Engineering
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
In high-rise apartment buildings, there are many pipes as part of the supply and drainage system for potable water. Leaks in these pipes result in a waste of usable water and money, especially when they are internal. In this project, we define “internal leaks” to be leaks that result from continuous, wasteful water flow rather than resulting from broken pipes or valves. Internal leaks are hard to detect as they do not leave an evident pool of water or drip loudly. By tracking water flow through a certain pipe over time, and looking for a consistent presence of water flow through that pipe, we can detect leaks in the system. Two previously designed prototype systems have done this: one with a water submetering system that fits into a pipe and one with an external analog acoustic detection system. The latter system influenced our design, which is a digital prototype that records water flow data using MEMS microphones. We process the audio signal on the Raspberry Pi, an embedded computer, to determine whether or not water is flowing through a pipe at any given time and transmit that data to an online database. The most important elements of our complete circuit design are the Raspberry Pi, the analog output MEMS INMP411 microphones, an op amp, and an AD converter. Testing our system demonstrated that it can clearly differentiate between the absence of water flow and the presence of a constant water flow. However, it struggles to categorize the absence of water flow and the cases where just a trickle of water runs through the pipe. Extending this project to transfer the programs from the Raspberry Pi to a dedicated audio microcontroller and to put our circuitry on a PCB would improve the system by making flow detection more accurate.