Vital requirement of fresh water is increasing dramatically due to the growth of the economy and population on our planet.

At
the same time, many countries have the conflict of sharing the water with their environs. Monitoring of water distribution is a
very important solution for solving the above crisis. In this paper, LabVIEW based measurement and investigation of water
intake of the sector is implemented. The proposed system consists of mass flow meter, Zigbee Communication Protocol,
ATmega328P microcontroller and LabVIEW Software. The measurement is very accurate and also communicated to remote
for analysis of water utilization. The result of the proposed system to educate the effective usage of water in a sector.
Keywords: Water Consumption, LabVIEW, Zigbee, Microcontroller.

INTRODUCTION
On our planet around 70 % of the area is covered with an abundance of water. Nevertheless the availability of the
fresh water is merely 3%, which is not ample to accomplish the quality of human life with social necessity. In this fresh water,
the utilization of living beings is limited to 1 % due to the two third of that in the form of frozen glaciers [1]. Cleaned
freshwater is an essential ingredient for a healthy human life, but 1.1 billion people lack access to water and 2.7 billion
experience water scarcities at least one month a year. The World wildlife fund (WWF) report on water scarcity is, By 2025,
two-thirds of the worlds population may be facing water shortages. When waters run dry, people cant get enough to drink,
wash, or feed crops, and economic decline may occur. In addition, inadequate sanitation problem due to water crisis to 2.4
billion people can lead deadly diarrheal diseases, including cholera and typhoid fever, and other waterborne illnesses [2].
By nature, water is a renewable source that can manage sustainable; the worldwide water supply is in fact rapidly
declining due to misuse and pollution. In this work, the misuse of the water usage is taken into the consideration. The
accurate measurement of water consumption gives the knowledge of water intake to the community. And also made the
investigation of water consumption is used for the optimum usage of water by a person. Subsequent section II is described
the method of flow measurement, wireless communication and analysis using LabVIEW. Section III and IV are discuss the
results and conclusion of proposed method respectively.
Literature Review
Proposed Method
The developed system consists of flow meter, Microcontroller, wireless protocol and LabVIEW. The flow of water
measurement has many techniques such as mass flow meter and volume flow meter. In this proposed method is used for
measuring flow rate by turbine type mass flow meter. Turbine flow meter (YF-S201) is used to gauge the flow of water in
both industrial and domestic applications as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig.1.Turbine type flow meter(YF-S201)

The meter consists of a plastic valve body, a rotor and a Hall Effect sensor. It contains a pinwheel sensor to measure how
much liquid has moved through it. The pinwheel rotor rotates as water flows all the way through the valve and its speed will
be directly proportional to the flow rate. There is an integrated magnetic Hall Effect sensor that outputs an electrical pulse
with every revolution of the pinwheel rotor. The Hall Effect sensor is sealed from the water pipe and allows the sensor to stay
safe and dry. This water flow module can be interfaced with Arduino Boards and Raspberry - Pi.

The connection stuck between the water flow and the pulse generated by the module is resolute through multipoint
calibration. The pulses produce by module is continuously measured for various flow rates to the limit level of the
sensor specification, i.e. (1-30l/min). Calibration factor which is reference value or correct reading to test out the widely used
parameters such as linearity, repeatability, accuracy, resolution and range normally in the turbine type flow measurement. In
view of the fact that the sensor is the compute of variation in signal across the actual flow range of the sensor. Linearity of
the flow module come to a decision with the actual output variance from the average K factor which is shown in
Fig. 2. Hence the calibration factor may be identical for a complete operational range of the sensor. With this condition the
volume of the water flowed through the pipeline can be calculated by the linear relationship between flow rate and sensor
output.

Microcontroller:
The modernization of measurement and control of various applications in domestic and industry have user friendly
interfaces which require reprogrammable electronic chip. In this work, arduino development platform is used which has
atmega328P microcontroller. Arduino is the open source electronic platform with extensible hardware and software. The
flow meter pulses are feed as a input to arduino uno board and acquired data is serially transmitted to the remote
monitoring section using Zigbee Protocol. The output of the sensor .

Zigbee
The output of the sensor is transmitted through Zigbee protocol to the remote monitoring section. Zigbee is interfaced with
the arduino using the serial communication technique. As it supports serial communication and have a serial port to send
and receive data. It can also exchange data with other Zigbee to form a mesh. Zigbee can also be used to make a local area
network
and
possible
to
transmit
the
digital
pulses
with
250Kbps
at
2.4
GHz.
The frequency of the pulse of sensor is too high compared with the module frequency so that the frequency of the pulse is
decreased from 15 through Arduino programming before the transmission. The transmission range of Zigbee module is
100m in line of sight.

Data Acquisition (DAQ)

LabVIEW system is provided with PC based data acquisition. When data is collected from an instrument, it passes
throughout three domains of interest. At the lowest level, a sensor detects a substantial event and sends it back by way
of a signal to the PC. There, a device known as a Data Acquisition (DAQ) card takes the signal and converts it into digital
data that can be processed by the computer. Data acquisition also be done by digital DAQ card (NI 9401). After the
transmission, the data at the receiver end is acquired by the LabVIEW software through DAQ (Data Acquisition) card.

LabVIEW Environment
The front panel window acts as a display section or the monitoring section in the LabVIEW environment. The water
consumption at particular interval is indicated as in progress Flow rate (litre/10min) on the front panel. In this case the
interval is 10 minutes. So, for every 10 minutes the amount of water consumed is displayed continuously. The continuous

monitoring of utilizing water is displayed on the front panel by means of numeric indicator as Total Flow (litre) until Stop
button is pressed. The whole program is terminated by pressing the Stop button.
VI program is developed in the block diagram window where the digital data acquired from DAQ are converted into a user
readable format. The block diagram of the VI is shown in Fig. 4. A DAQ assistant icon is used to configure the DAQ with
LabVIEW and Write to Measurement file icon is used to store the water consumption rate in MS Excel.

Fig. 4. Block diagram window inLabVIEW

Results
References

[1] UN Water Statistics http://www.unwater.org/statistics_res.html

[2] World Wildlife Fund http://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/water-scarcity
[3]

BalaMurugan, H. Siva Nagaraju, S.V. Sathish Kumar, K. Ramakrishnan, K.C. Sowjanya V.E. (2013) PV Solar cell Real time data

[4]

Monitoring using Lab VIEW and DAQ, IJAREEIE, Vol 3, Issue 8, August 2013, p. 4093-4098,4100.
Mduduzi John, Mudumbe and Adnan M. Abu-Mahfouz (2015)Smart Water Meter System for User-Centric Consumption Measurement,

[5]

an IEEE paper.
Popa, M. Ciocarlie, H. Popa A.S. and Racz, M.B. (2010) Smart Metering for Monitoring Domestic Utilities, 14th International

[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]

Conference on Intelligent Engineering Systems (INES).

Ian Abbott Donnelly, Ed., Water consumption Monitor US patent US20120022803 A1, Jan 26, 2012.
LabVIEW Getting Started with LabVIEW, National Instruments.
LabVIEW Data Acquisition VI Reference Manual, National Instruments.
LabVIEW NI 9401 operating instructions and specifications, National Instruments.
www.ni.com/labview
www.arduino.cc

[3]the paper proposed by Hutcheon et.al. describes the volume flow rate measurement using a turbine type
flowmeter fitted with a saturable magnetic pick up. (Mass flow measurement with turbine type flowmeters an electronic
method of density correction
[4] the paper proposed by