Gas Metering Using Optical Sensor

Buildings contribute 40% of the world-wide energy usage and contribute notable amount of the total CO
₂
emissions. The drive to cut building energy consumption and the CO
₂
emissions is the key catalyst to automate energy consumption monitoring systems. Reduction in energy consumption can be attained through sensible cooperation between end users and technological advancements more readily. Smart metering is a hot topic with a rapid and continuous development. Smart metering offers the advantages in measuring and managing the building utilities such as: electricity, water, gas etc. There are different types of domestic gas meters deployed in UK. The most common types of gas meters are digital metric, digital imperial and dial meters. The approach presented here is to monitor legacy dial-type imperial gas meters using optical image processing. In this way, the proposed solution realizes a real-time gas metering via optical sensors. We implemented and evaluated the proposed gas metering technique in Internet of Things (IOT) systems. Two experiment test results verify the innovative design and confirm that the proposed solution is reasonably precise and repeatable. The net difference for each experiment between actual rotation and detected rotation was zero.