ISA 2012 Automation Week Track: Safety/Environmental Thursday, 27 September, 1:30-3:00 pm, Room 205B Yuichiro Yamaguchi Toshiba Corporation Water is one of the requisite resources for life, social living, and environment conservation. Water is also an important resource for industrial infrastructure. In this, monitoring waterworks system plays the important role for supply of stable water. In recent years, there is growing demand for accurate monitoring as a countermeasure against water leakage in water utilities, particularly in developing countries. Electromagnetic flowmeters have superior features including higher accuracy compared with other types of flowmeters, as well as high reliability due to the absence of moving parts inside the measuring pipe.
However, the necessity of power sources and the costs of wiring between power sources and flowmeters limit the use of electromagnetic flowmeters in the field of wide-area infrastructure systems such as water supply networks relative to rotary-type flowmeters. In response to this situation, Toshiba has developed a high-performance battery-powered electromagnetic flowmeter that offers new solutions for the wide-area infrastructure of water supply services. This flowmeter can operate for up to nine years powered by its internal battery, and it achieves almost the same accuracy as mains-powered electromagnetic flowmeters.
The objectives in the development of the battery-powered electromagnetic flowmeter are to maintain the original performance of mains-powered electromagnetic and to have long battery life. To achieve these, Toshiba employs the method of residual magnetism excitation, which will be introduced in this presentation. In addition, the solution of decreasing water leakage by monitoring wide waterworks with battery-operated electromagnetic flowmeter as a key device will also be presented.
