Abstract
The AMR(automatic meter reading) system has been increasingly and widely used for its efficient and intelligent management, which is a technology that automatically collects consumption data from a water meter or energy metering device. The digital meter instead of the mechanical meter should be used in the system. Up to now, various types of sensor to measure the water flow rate have been used in the digital water meter, for example, reed switch, photo IR approximate sensor, ultrasonic sensor, electromagnetic sensor, etc. In this paper, a new sensing technology, where a variable capacitor and digital circuit were used for sensing the water flow rate, was proposed. The circuit was designed and verified by Pspice simulation. And a PCB board for the circuit was fabricated. After then, a prototype of digital water meter using a variable capacitor to measure the water flow rate was fabricated. The function tests of the fabricated digital water meter were performed, and it was found that the meter worked properly. Since the new technology has much better properties in terms of cost and power consumption compared to conventional technologies, it should be one of the major digital water meter technologies in the future.
