Development of Inductive Sensor for Control Gate Opening of an Agricultural Irrigation System

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] The monitoring of water level in the agriculture irrigation channels is essential to control the opening gates of these channels. In this way, WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) have high relevance to obtain this kind of data. In this paper, we propose a sensor to measure the depth changes in irrigation channels to control the gates opening. It is connected to an Adafruit Feather HUZZAH based on ESP8266, which allows us to build a mobile edge computing system. The developed sensor is based on two coils. Sinus-wave powers the first one, and the second is induced. The coils are winding over a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) that has high resistance for corrosion and low price. Besides, we use copper wire as a conductive metal. We test two different configurations of coils. P1 has five spires for the powered coil (PC) and ten spires for the induced coil (IC). On the other hand, P2 has 40 spires for the PC and 80 spires for the IC. The two prototypes were coiled in one layer. Then, both sensors are tested using a glass bottle where the water column increased with the target to obtain the information of the depth. In both prototypes, the difference of voltage between the maximum and minimum studied depths is more or less the same, 4.46V for P1 and 4.44V for P2. Nevertheless, during the stabilization test, the P1 showed better adaptation for the turbulences than the P2. The P1 shows an oscillation of 0.48V, where the P2 has a maximum fluctuation of 3.2V.This work has been partially supported by European Union through the ERANETMED (Euromediterranean Cooperation through ERANET joint activities and beyond) project ERANETMED3-227 SMARTWATIR by the Conselleria de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte with the Subvenciones para la contratacion de personal investigador en fase postdoctoral, grant number APOSTD/2019/04, and through the "Ayudas para contratacion predoctoral de Formacion del Profesorado Universitario FPU (Convocatoria 2016)". Grant number FPU16/05540.Basterrechea-Chertudi, DA.; Rocher-Morant, J.; Parra-Boronat, L.; Lloret, J. (2020). Development of Inductive Sensor for Control Gate Opening of an Agricultural Irrigation System. IEEE. 250-255. https://doi.org/10.1109/FMEC49853.2020.9144810S25025

A WSN-based monitoring system to control Sewerage

[EN] The sewerage is a critical infrastructure in cities because of the drainage of the urban runoff and the evacuation of the wastewater. Two types of sewerage, separated sewerage and combined sewerage, can be differentiated. In this paper, we show the application of a level sensor and a rain sensor for monitoring the separated sewerage. The level sensor is used for knowing if there is a critical level of water in the sewerage. The rain sensor is used to know if it is raining. The combination of this information allows the identification of three scenarios. These scenarios are normal situation, low drainage and illicit discharge/blockages in the pipeline. In addition, we study the use of sensors and mathematical models for monitoring the velocity of the wastewater. We concluded that the use of mathematical models is a good option for monitoring the velocity. Because with exception of the thermal sensors the other types of sensors show important gaps. The velocity is used to estimate the flow that is dumping in the water bodies. We use an ESP32 board program with Arduino IDE for data collection and sending the data to a server on the same network via Wi-Fi. The server is a computer that processes the data. We present the programming code and the ports that should be used for transmitting the data from Arduino to computer server.Supported by European Union through the project ERANETMED3-227 SMARTWATIR by the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Grant number FPU16/05540Rocher-Morant, J.; García-Navas, JL.; Romero Martínez, JO.; Lloret, J. (2019). A WSN-based monitoring system to control Sewerage. IEEE. 277-282. https://doi.org/10.1109/IOTSMS48152.2019.8939269S27728

Contactless Sensing of Water Properties for Smart Monitoring of Pipelines

A key milestone for the pervasive diffusion of wireless sensing nodes for smart monitoring of water quality and quantity in distribution networks is the simplification of the installation of sensors. To address this aspect, we demonstrate how two basic contactless sensors, such as piezoelectric transducers and strip electrodes (in a longitudinal interdigitated configuration to sense impedance inside and outside of the pipe with potential for impedimetric leak detection), can be easily clamped on plastic pipes to enable the measurement of multiple parameters without contact with the fluid and, thus, preserving the integrity of the pipe. Here we report the measurement of water flow rate (up to 24 m(3)/s) and temperature with ultrasounds and of the pipe filling fraction (capacitance at 1 MHz with similar to cm(3) resolution) and ionic conductivity (resistance at 20 MHz from 700 to 1400 mu S/cm) by means of impedance. The equivalent impedance model of the sensor is discussed in detail. Numerical finite-element simulations, carried out to optimize the sensing parameters such as the sensing frequency, confirm the lumped models and are matched by experimental results. In fact, a 6 m long, 30 L demonstration hydraulic loop was built to validate the sensors in realistic conditions (water speed of 1 m/s) monitoring a pipe segment of 0.45 m length and 90 mm diameter (one of the largest ever reported in the literature). Tradeoffs in sensors accuracy, deployment, and fabrication, for instance, adopting single-sided flexible PCBs as electrodes protected by Kapton on the external side and experimentally validated, are discussed as well