Underground Water Flow Speed and Direction Measurement Using Differential Pressure Sensors

To measure water flow, currently many sensors have been proposed using ultrasonic or electromagnetic induction method. However, those sensors are not suitable for wireless sensor network systems to measure and monitor water flow remotely due to high power consumption. Therefore, a small sized and low power consuming sensor is necessary to monitor water flow using a wireless sensor network system. In this paper, we propose a new sensor system for underground water flow monitoring using differential pressure sensors. The sensor system consisted of four differential pressure sensors measuring pressure differences, which are converted into flow speed and flow direction. We designed, fabricated and evaluated the sensor system. As a result, we confirmed that the sensor system successfully measured water flow speed when the speed was faster than 400 mm/sec. Moreover, in case of water flow direction, the sensor system could successfully detect it when water flow speed was faster than 882 mm/sec. Although there was water speed limitation for sensing caused from pressure sensor specification, we could validate the proposed sensor system.