Development and Experimental Assessment of a Fluid Flow Monitoring System Using Flow Sensor and Arduino Interface

. In recent years, the industrial use of the internet of things (IoT) has been constantly growing and is now widespread. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a fundamental technology that has enabled such prevalent adoption of IoT in industry. WSNs can connect IoT sensors and monitor the working conditions of such sensors and of the overall environment, as well as detect unexpected system events in a timely and accurate manner. Monitoring large amounts of unstructured data generated by IoT devices and collected by the big-data analytics systems is a challenging task. Furthermore, detecting anomalies within the vast amount of data collected in real time by a centralized monitoring system is an even bigger challenge. In the context of the industrial use of the IoT, solutions for monitoring anomalies in distributed data flow need to be explored. In this paper, a low-power distributed data flow anomaly-monitoring model (LP-DDAM) is proposed to mitigate the communication overhead problem. As the data flow monitoring system is only interested in anomalies, which are rare, and the relationship among objects in terms of the size of their attribute values remains stable within any specific period of time, LP-DDAM integrates multiple objects as a complete set for processing, makes full use of the relationship among the objects, selects only one “representative” object for continuous monitoring, establishes certain constraints to ensure correctness, and reduces communication overheads by maintaining the overheads of constraints in exchange for a reduction in the number of monitored objects. Experiments on real data sets show that LP-DDAM can reduce communication overheads by approximately 70% when compared to an equivalent method that continuously monitors all objects under the same conditions.

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Piezoresistive Carbon Nanofiber-Based Cilia-Inspired Flow Sensor

Nanomaterials ◽

10.3390/nano10020211 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 211 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Debarun Sengupta ◽

Duco Trap ◽

Ajay Giri Prakash Kottapalli

Keyword(s):

Carbon Nanofiber ◽

Detection Threshold ◽

Flow Sensor ◽

Oxygen Intake ◽

Mems Devices ◽

Flow Sensors ◽

Flow Monitoring ◽

Flow Sensing ◽

Artificial Cilia ◽

Lower Detection

Evolving over millions of years, hair-like natural flow sensors called cilia, which are found in fish, crickets, spiders, and inner ear cochlea, have achieved high resolution and sensitivity in flow sensing. In the pursuit of achieving such exceptional flow sensing performance in artificial sensors, researchers in the past have attempted to mimic the material, morphological, and functional properties of biological cilia sensors, to develop MEMS-based artificial cilia flow sensors. However, the fabrication of bio-inspired artificial cilia sensors involves complex and cumbersome micromachining techniques that lay constraints on the choice of materials, and prolongs the time taken to research, design, and fabricate new and novel designs, subsequently increasing the time-to-market. In this work, we establish a novel process flow for fabricating inexpensive, yet highly sensitive, cilia-inspired flow sensors. The artificial cilia flow sensor presented here, features a cilia-inspired high-aspect-ratio titanium pillar on an electrospun carbon nanofiber (CNF) sensing membrane. Tip displacement response calibration experiments conducted on the artificial cilia flow sensor demonstrated a lower detection threshold of 50 µm. Furthermore, flow calibration experiments conducted on the sensor revealed a steady-state airflow sensitivity of 6.16 mV/(m s−1) and an oscillatory flow sensitivity of 26 mV/(m s−1), with a lower detection threshold limit of 12.1 mm/s in the case of oscillatory flows. The flow sensing calibration experiments establish the feasibility of the proposed method for developing inexpensive, yet sensitive, flow sensors; which will be useful for applications involving precise flow monitoring in microfluidic devices, precise air/oxygen intake monitoring for hypoxic patients, and other biomedical devices tailored for intravenous drip/urine flow monitoring. In addition, this work also establishes the applicability of CNFs as novel sensing elements in MEMS devices and flexible sensors.

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