International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 12, Number 16 (2017) pp.
5559-5564
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
Smart Pipeline Water Leakage Detection System
Gopalakrishnan P.1, Abhishek S.2, Ranjith R.3, Venkatesh R.4 and Jai Suriya V.5
1
Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore,
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, India – 641112.
Orcid: 0000-0001-7785-5478
2
Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore,
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, India – 641112.
Orcid: 0000-0003-0507-2487
3
Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore,
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, India – 641112.
Orcid: 0000-0001-5295-2669
4
Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering,
Coimbatore, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, India – 641112.
Orcid: 0000-0001-5178-2282
5
Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering,
Coimbatore, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, India – 641112.
Orcid: 0000-0001-9401-1672
Abstract of the suggested system was implemented and tested with
various scenarios and the results are presented in this paper.
Water is an essential natural resource required for survival.
Water resource management is one of the key goals of any
Most of the area in the planet earth is covered with water. But
country in the world as water requirement is increasing
only less percent of water is directly consumable by living
steeply; involving automation in such systems will reduce
beings. Transportation of such resource is made easy by
human errors and will increase efficiency and thus decreasing
means of manmade pipeline connections. Leakage constitutes
the supply demand gap.
a major loss of drinking water when supplied through pipeline
systems. Introducing automated leakage detection systems Keywords: Water Leak Detection, flow rate sensor, Cloud
would save huge amount of water globally. In developed based data logging, automatic flow cutoff
countries water leakage is found using acoustic devices which
uses vibrations or sound induced by the pressurized pipes. But
in developing countries major leaks are found only when it is INTRODUCTION
visible on the surface, this results in considerable amount of
Conservation of water is one of the major objectives for any
water getting wasted. Water leak detection by means of
country around the world. Water management plays a very
simple embedded system aids water conservation in a cost-
important role in a society [1], as it is one of the basic needs for
effective way. The flow sensors can be used for detecting the
the mankind. Water supplied for human consumption must be
leak and solenoid valves placed in different parts of the
highly efficient with minimum wastage. In a developing
pipeline can obstruct the water flow until the defective part of
country like India, loss of water in domestic sector on account
the pipeline is repaired. And further, the leak occurred shall be
of leakage is approximately 30 to 40% of the total flow in the
informed to concerned authorities wirelessly by means of
distribution. This leads to high risks in public health, money
cloud based data logging. GPRS module enables data logging
invested and on the valuable natural resource. India had an
with the existing cellular network infrastructure. A prototype
irrigation efficiency of ~36 percent in 1993-1994 and
5559
International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 12, Number 16 (2017) pp. 5559-5564
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
projected that efficiency would have to increase to 60 percent deployed in the proposed system is based on the principle of
by 2050 to bring a balance in the demand and supply of water Hall Effect. Electric potential is generated perpendicular to
[2] [3]
. both electric current flowing along a conducting material and
an external magnetic field applied at right angles to the
The existing water supply systems incorporate high range
current upon application of the external disturbance. This
acoustic and pressure detection devices are way costlier to be
principle is directly used to measure the flow rate [6]. When the
implemented in developing countries. Some irrigation leak
liquid moves through the pipe it rotates a small turbine
detection systems [4] use heating coils to detect the flow rate
attached to the hall sensor which produces pulses whenever
difference which has a drawback of detecting the fast change
the blade is rotated and the analog signal produced is sent to
over in the system due to the uniform response of the
the microcontroller for calculations and the same is
temperature sensor. Some other systems [5] [6] use the flow
transmitted to the cloud GPRS module. The flow sensor is
sensors to measure the flow rate. This single parameter does
capable of detecting up to 30L/Min and a pressure of 2.0MPa.
not help in stopping leakage in the system.
Solenoid Valve
In this paper, a flow sensor based system integrated with
microcontroller to detect the leak due to breakage has been The control action is taken by means of solenoid valve during
discussed. This system is designed to prevent the further the event of water leak by stopping the water flow.
leakage of water flowing through the pipe line. This paper is
organized in the order of methodology which explains the
working of the system, components used to build the system
and the results which signify the efficient leakage prevention
based on a prototype.
METHODOLOGY
The water leakage detection system can be deployed in the
already existing plumbing with flow rate sensors attached in
the path of the water flow. The sensor does not obstruct the
water flow but just collects the data of flow rate. Actuators
like solenoid valve is needed to control the water flow in the
event of a leak.
The proposed system uses a microcontroller which constantly
reads the data from multiple flow rate sensors thereby
constantly monitoring the water flow. It compares the flow
rate by calculating the difference in data from subsequent
sensors and takes the necessary action. If the difference is
greater than the set threshold, microcontroller signals the
solenoid valve to stop the water flow and sends alert
information to the user. This minimizes the water wastage. On
the other hand, if the difference is less than the threshold, it
sends the sensor data to the cloud for data logging and the
process continues as shown in Fig. 1. Online data logging
allows the user to keep track of the water usage and take
necessary decisions to conserve the water.
HARDWARE COMPONENTS
This section deals with the explanation about the hardware
components used in the implementation of smart water
leakage detection system.
Flow sensor
The main input to the microcontroller is the flow sensor (as Figure 1: Flow Chart describing the Control Action to
shown in Fig. 2) which is used to find the flow rate of a liquid. minimize Water Wastage
There are various kinds of flow sensors, and the one which is
5560
International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 12, Number 16 (2017) pp. 5559-5564
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
maintained for communication between the microcontroller
and GPRS module. The serial Monitor of the Arduino IDE is
turned on to monitor the activity going in between the two
devices like Connection Status, Data Transfer status etc.
whenever necessary.
Microcontroller
The microcontroller takes input from the sensors and based on
the user’s algorithm, it takes decisions and signals the
Figure 2: Water Flow Rate Sensor
actuator. The proposed system involves reading of a simple
analog data and turning on/off a relay. Since there are no
complex calculations involved, a simple 8-bit microcontroller
The solenoid valve (as shown in Fig. 3) is an
like ATmega328 will be sufficient. Since it is a RISC based
electromechanical device which is used to regulate the flow of
controller, it requires low power for operation.
the liquid. Internally the valve has a ferromagnetic rod type
material blocking the flow of the fluid. When the coil is
energized the rod gets attracted and clears the area for the
CONSTRUCTION AND WORKING
flow of the fluid. The solenoid valve used here requires 12V
DC. This section describes the construction and working of the
smart water leakage detection system.
The valve will be equivalent to a closed switch when it is
energized. A total flow of up to 3L/Min with a maximum Flow sensor placement
pressure of 3 psi can be achieved. This valve is connected to This system starts to work when the water is allowed by the
the output of microcontroller by the means of a relay circuit. water board authorities for various industrial uses and
This valve will be activated by means of a trigger pulse from domestic purposes. The water flow measurement sensors are
the microcontroller whenever leakage is being detected in the placed at regular intervals in main pipeline as well as in the
pipe line sensor system. branches (as depicted in Fig. 4 & 5). This kind of setup
ensures that the leak can be located at a particular branch. The
water enters through all the pipelines and reaches the desired
location flowing through various flows rate measurement
sensors.
Figure 3: Solenoid Valve
GPRS Module
The primary objective of GPRS Module (SIM900A) is to
transmit the obtained flow rate sensor data from the
microcontroller to the Cloud based Server wirelessly. In the
proposed system GPRS Module is used as a data transmitting
device where there is no access point available to the Internet
after certain range. The GPRS module uses the mobile
network radio waves for easy access to the internet.
With the aid of SIM Card and external power supply, the
module will be ready to communicate to the internet. Several Figure 4: Water flow sensor placement
AT commands are used to connect to the Internet via GPRS
which has a TCP/IP protocol (Inbuilt). A Baud rate of 9600 is
5561
International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 12, Number 16 (2017) pp. 5559-5564
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
(a) (b)
Figure 5: Hardware Setup, (a) Sensor-Actuator Placement in
the pipeline; (b) Flow sensor Placed in the path of water flow
Flow rate monitoring system Figure 7: Leakage Scenario
All the flow rate measurement sensors pertaining to a
particular area are connected to microcontroller for as show in Integrated Water Cut-off System
Fig. 6. Couple of microcontrollers is connected to the
Network such that we can monitor and control water supply The automatic water cut-off system is very useful to stop the
for the whole region. Each Flow rate sensor sends the amount leakage of water at various points if a leakage is detected. The
of water passing through it to microcontroller. The Monitoring system detects the leakage of water and sends an
microcontroller collects the data from flow sensors and sends alert signal. In addition to this the water supply is stopped
the values to the Cloud using GPRS [7] connected to the with the help of solenoid value connected to the water
internet. The flow rate measurements are logged into a sensor pipelines [8].
cloud which can be utilized for later use. This method is
commonly known as data logging.
Leak Detection Algorithm
The Microcontroller constantly monitors the flow rate when
the system is in On State. The Leak detection algorithm works
in such a way that, whenever the Flow rate difference between
two consecutive sensors is greater than a calibrated threshold
value, a leakage is detected by the microcontroller. Fig. 7
shows the leakage scenario in the system. The Flow rate
difference is also logged into the Cloud through GPRS
module as in Fig. 8. Whenever a Leakage is detected an alert Figure 8: GSM/GPRS module setup
or notification is triggered and message is sent to the
concerned authorities.
The solenoid valve is connected in series with a transistor
such that the transistor works as a switch. Fig. 9 shows the
circuitry involved in the solenoid valve set up. The Solenoid
valve is normally closed type. Whenever the base signal is
applied to the transistor, makes the solenoid value normally
open allowing the flow of water. But in case of water leakage,
the solenoid value should have normally closed configuration
for blockage of water supply. Hence the base signal to the
transistor is removed which stops the water flow thus saving
wastage of water at initial stage itself.
Figure 6: Microcontroller connected to flow sensors
5562
International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 12, Number 16 (2017) pp. 5559-5564
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
Figure 9: Solenoid Circuit (a)
Fig. 10 (a) and (b) show the condition of the leakage in the
beginning of the leak and after the action of the solenoid
valve. The leak is completely prevented and a notification is
sent to the authority.
(b)
Figure 11: (a) Flow rate data obtained from cloud; (b) Flow
(a) (b) rate during normal Condition
Figure 10: (a) Few Cycles after beginning of the leak; (b)
Supply cut off after Leak Detection
The graph in Fig. 11(a) shows the data logged from two
consecutive sensors during a given interval. The graph in Fig.
11(b)) shows the condition of flow rate during normal
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
condition. When there is no water flow, the flow rate is zero
A prototype was developed with help of two flow rate sensors and when the water is allowed to flow, the flow rate gradually
and solenoid value (12V) connected in series in the water increases and is remains constant.
pipeline. The prototype is tested at various conditions of water
flow. Positive results were obtained using the prototype built.
Water Flow controller is turned ON initially such that water
flows through the water pipelines. The Flow rate data of both
the sensors is obtained by the microcontroller periodically.
The Microcontroller also uses water leakage detection
algorithm to calculate the flow rate difference between two
consecutive sensors. The difference is also logged into the
Cloud for triggering the leakage detection. Once the leak is
detected notification is sent to authorities for fixing of
damaged pipelines. In addition to Water flow is stopped when
leak is detected.
(a)
5563
International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 12, Number 16 (2017) pp. 5559-5564
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
REFERENCES
[1] Mukul Kulshrestha, Efficiency Evaluation of Urban
Water Supply Utilities in India, Environmental
Engineering Division, Department of Civil Engineering,
National Institute of Technology, MANIT-Bhopal, India.
[2] Water sector in India: Overview and focus areas for the
future, PanIIT Conclave 2010, Available from:
https://www.kpmg.de/docs/Water_sector_in_India.pdf
[3] Guidelines For Improving Water Use Efficiency in
Irrigation, Domestic & Industrial Sectors, Central water
commission, Ministry of water resources, Government of
India, November 2014, Available from:
http://wrmin.nic.in/writereaddata/Guidelines_for_improvi
(b) ng_water_use_efficiency.pdf
Figure 12: (a) Flow rate during water leakage; (b) Flow rate [4] Adam Openshaw, Kalvin Vu, Irrigation Leak Detection-
difference in a node during water leakage Using Flow Rate Sensors to Detect Breaks in an
Irrigation System, Available from:
http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar
When there is a leak in a particular node, the flow rate in that ticle=1010&context=cpesp
node changes as show in Fig. 12(a). As the flow rate change
between the two sensors in that node increases, the water [5] Teddy Ariyatham, water leak detection, california state
supply is shutdown (as shown in Fig. 12(b)) after a given university, northridge, Available from:
threshold value. http://scholarworks.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3
/132789/Ariyatham-Teddy-thesis-2015.pdf?sequence=1
[6] Ria Sood, Manjit Kaur, Hemant Lenka, DESIGN AND
CONCLUSION DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATIC WATER FLOW
Water for domestic purposes is always very essential and it is METER, International Journal of Computer Science,
mandatory to prevent it from getting wasted due to any Engineering and Applications (IJCSEA) Vol.3, No.3,
pipeline leaks. Hence the designed prototype is an effective June 2013
solution for monitoring the flow of water as well as detecting [7] T.Deepiga, A.Sivasankari"Smart Water Monitoring
for leaks in the pipelines. The smart water leakage detection System Using Wireless Sensor Network at
system can help in water distribution process by remote Home/Office," International Research Journal of
activation of solenoid valves. Usage of cloud logging Engineering and Technology, Vol. 2, No.4, pp. 1305-
technique enables the data acquisition and analysis in any 1314, July 2015.
point of the pipeline. This makes the system cost efficient and
simple. [8] N.Suresh, E.Balaji, K.Jeffry Anto, J.Jenith," Raspberry Pi
based Liquid Flow Monitoring and Control,"
The system is capable of detecting leaks between any sensor International Journal of Research in Engineering and
nodes rather than the exact location of the leak. The sensors Technology, Vol.03, pp. 122-125, Jul. 2014.
require lengthy wiring for power supply and data
transmission. This reduces the area under observation. The [9] Ali M. Sadeghioon, Nicole Metje, David N. Chapman
sensors and actuators can be powered by batteries or solar and Carl J. Anthony, "Smart Pipes: Smart Wireless
panel. Wireless transceivers can be fitted to acquire the data Sensor Networks for Leak Detection in Water Pipelines,"
from the sensor and send command signals to actuator. This Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks, Vol. 3, pp. 64-
sensor network based system may increase the system cost, 78, 2014.
but it adds the advantage of monitoring a huge area with
minimal human power.
5564
