Water meter design eases accurate billing
A
Sagentia product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Jun 23, 2008
The AccuLinx water meter register can be used with multijet systems, which make up about half of the water meters used in the world.
Sagentia has released Master Meter's AccuLinx water meter register.
AccuLinx is an eight-wheel absolute encoder without batteries that connects the water meter to third-party automatic reading (AMR) systems using Sagentia's Gray Wheels sensing technology.
The system provides utility companies a way of accurately, remotely and electronically reading the mechanical odometer for billing purposes and detecting leaks.
This system is "noncontact", creating no friction.
It can be used with multijet systems, which make up about half of the water meters used in the world.
Sagentia was approached by Master Meter to design the mechanics (gearbox and enclosure) for a water meter register based on a third party's six-wheel encoder.
Sagentia initially reduced the tooling outlay for the gearbox variants by 90%, saving Master Meter millions of dollars.
Sagentia also changed the design to include eight wheels.
During this development Dr Robin Lee, Head of Science and Technology at Sagentia came up with an idea for a new sensing principle for the absolute encoder, which reads the position of the wheels in an odometer (like a trip meter in a car).
Dr Lee presented the idea to Scott Seehoffer, Director or AMR Technology at Master Meter and he saw the potential to develop a real product.
An exclusive license deal was signed with Sagentia for the use of the technology.
Dr Robin Lee said: "I was trying to think of ways to improve on the existing technology".
"We had previously been doing work on inductive sensors as a simple detector of a metal object and I was able to build on this to develop an idea that would determine the position in a number of zones".
"I spent the weekend writing up the idea and described it to some of my colleagues the following week".
"We were aware of the technologies available for absolute encoders for water meter registers".
"However, there were still some problems".
"To make the idea more widely applicable and useful we needed a spatial pattern code for the coils that had some very special properties".
"Fortunately, one of our mathematical experts, Dr Ross Jones, was able to solve this challenging problem and soon we had the foundations of a sensor system".
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