Wireless Sensor Network Based on wM-Bus for Leakage Detection in Gas and Water Pipes
In the last years, energy saving is one of the dominant themes of public opinion, and thus the technological research is focused on this topic. The only adoption of new and more efficient technologies does not solve problem of the losses introduced by the
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1 The Proposed Approach Several technologies for the detection of the leakages in pipes carrying gas, oil, or water are available in literature. Some of them allow also the localization of the losses over the pipe. In the following, the so-called negative pressure wave (NPW) technique for detection and localization of leakages in water and gas distribution grid has been considered. The system estimates the distance between a measurement station and the leakage by means of the NPW generated by the leakage itself. The time delay (∆t) between the receptions of the same NPW by two stations placed on the same pipe segment is estimated. Then, it is possible to evaluate the leakage position knowing the speed of the NPW. In (1), the equation for the estimation of the distance of the leakage (L1) from the pressure station 1 (see Fig. 1) is showed:
L1 =
L + n w Dt 2
(1)
where L is the distance between the two stations, νw is the speed of the wave, and Δt is the time delay between the detection of the NPW by the two stations. Nowadays, WSN (wireless sensor network) is a mature technology and adopted in a great number of application fields, from health care [1] to industrial applications [2]. Solutions based on WSN are suitable for the data exchange and synchronization requirements involved in NPW system. The wireless communication technologies used in smart metering system, which performs distributed measurements of water and gas, can be also applied to identify and to localize leakages on pipe. The new
P. Ferrari • A. Flammini • S. Rinaldi (*) • A. Vezzoli Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, via Branze 38, Brescia 25123, Italy e-mail: [email protected] 407 C. Di Natale et al. (eds.), Sensors and Microsystems: Proceedings of the 17th National Conference, Brescia, Italy, 5-7 February 2013, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 268, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-00684-0_78, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
408 Fig. 1 The operating principle of NPW leakage localization system
P. Ferrari et al. leakage Pressure sensor 1
Pressure sensor 2
NPW
Fig. 2 The architecture of the monitoring WSN based on wM-bus
wM-Bus concentrator (MUC) wM-Bus meter pipe segment wM-Bus concentrator communication range
regulation about gas and water metering stimulates the producers of metering devices to focus on distributed monitoring, exploiting for data transmission the wMbus communication [3]. This communication technology provides a wide data communication range and long operational life for battery-operated devices. The monitoring of an urban water or gas distribution grid requires a complex WSN, in order to monitor a wide area with several measurement points. An example of WSN network over a pipe grid, where a wM-Bus master and several measurement points are distributed through the whole grid, is shown in Fig. 2. In the proposed system, the distributed measurement of the NPW events requires an accurate time synchronization, to be able to provide an accurate estimation of spatia
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