AMR Development Trend in China¡¯s Water Sectors(continued)
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Intelligent water meter |
| The so-called intelligent water meter mainly covers two types of meters¨Cremote transmission water meter and prepayment water meter, this is in line with themarketing approaches of Chinese water utilities: "consuming first, charging second " and ¡°charging first, consuming second¡±. These are two types of systems available to consumers ¨C the remote meter reading system (remote transmission meter) and the prepayment system. Both are intelligent meters. In this article we will mainly focus on the remote transmission meters only. |
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| Actually, no matter which type of intelligent meters, the base meters are universal type mechanical meters, it is an expansion based on the universal type mechanical meter to electromechanical type through electronic technology and software to realize the transmission of metering data or the control of the valves by measuring the water usage. |
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| The intelligent meters perform two functions: collect and send data but using different reading, processing and transmission approaches. In general the remote transmission meter reading systems can be divided into the following types based on different theories and communication media: |
| 1.Impulse signal transmitting type |
| 2.Intelligent digital type |
| 3.Smart card type |
| 4.Communication using PLC type |
| 5.Wireless type (using RF, GSM or GPRS£© |
| 6.¡°Direct reading¡± type using a digital video camera to read data. |
(optical sensing) |
| But no matter which type of the systems, the main function of remote transmission
meter is to collect water consumption data, and transmit the collected data by certain
communication media to outdoor metering system,but it is not related to the
measurement of water meter itself. |
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| In the remote meter reading system, local data collectors are adopted to send meter
readings directly to the utilities, using different communication technologies such as
telephone line, GSPS and wireless. This enables the fully automatic meter reading
available. |
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| Of the meter data collecting techniques, wired type (impulse signal collected) are more
commonly used at present. Wireless, however, has some advantages over wired type
and is likely to be more widely applied in future, the distribution analysis is shown as
the following chart. |
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[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] |
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