Energy efficiency optimization in fluid flow metering

Fluid flow metering is an important issue for users for managing their resources and for the new developments of (smart) cities. This paper presents a fluid flow meter with an embedded energy management strategy. On one side an energy harvesting prototype generates energy from the fluid flow by a turbine and from the fluid pressure fluctuations by a piezoelectric generator. On the other side, RF communication time has been reduced by data compression. The duration of the emission is reduced and power can be saved with compressed data. The compromise between the compression ratio and the computational costs has been studied. A complete energy balance has been achieved under different operating conditions and shows that the harvested energy is higher than the energy required for compressing and transmitting the data from a flow rate of approximately one hundred of l/h. This has been verified experimentally in a real water distribution system by a prototype which respects the required metrological constraints.