Nine steps towards a better water meter management

The paper provides a comprehensive perspective of the critical aspects to be taken into account when planning the long-term management of water meters in a utility. In order to facilitate their quick understanding and practical implementation, they have been structured into nine steps. Ranging from an initial audit up to the final periodic meter replacement planning, these steps cover three aspects of the problem – field work, laboratory work and management tasks; and each one is developed in detail paying attention to the particular data needed and noting the practical outcome it will yield.

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Betwixt and Between: Bridging the Gap Between Field and Repository

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards ◽

10.3897/biss.2.27042 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. e27042

Author(s):

Meghan Grizzle

Keyword(s):

National Park ◽

Field Work ◽

The United States ◽

Online Database ◽

Archaeological Collections ◽

Park Service ◽

Set Up ◽

Collections Care ◽

Term Management

All too often, archaeologists have viewed curation as a process that manages, rather than investigates, archaeological and natural history collections. The curation crisis can be understood as the result of a serious imbalance between the continued generation of field collections and a corresponding lack of resources and facilities devoted to accessioning, analyzing, reporting, curating and otherwise caring for these collections. Researchers mistakenly prioritize ‘interpretation at the trowel’s edge’ with emphasis on excavation and field work, without considering the problem of how and where to store the objects they excavate. While legislation, Curation of Federally Owned and Administered Archaeological Collections (36 C.F.R. Part 79), was intended to ensure the long-term management and care of these resources, the absence of funding at the institutional and federal levels, nonexistent enforcement of the legislation through the National Park Service, and lack of compliance from field archaeologists, have resulted in collections throughout the United States being at risk of loss through deterioration, mismanagement, and neglect. I will demonstrate that accessioning, inventorying, cataloguing, rehousing and conserving are meaningful generative encounters between scholars, objects and collections staff, not simply byproducts of research. The need for an online database specifically set up for archaeological collections is suggested as a way to address the curation crisis. Implementing digitization will enhance preservation by reducing damage to the artifacts caused by physical handling. Persons working within the field will gain a better understanding of collections care and the collections transition to the repository.

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Study and design of a retrofitted smart water meter solution with energy harvesting integration

Discover Internet of Things ◽

10.1007/s43926-021-00010-x ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Nelson Pimenta ◽

Paulo Chaves

Keyword(s):

Energy Harvesting ◽

Water Distribution ◽

Smart Water ◽

Ecological Problems ◽

Water Turbine ◽

Increasing Demand ◽

Water Meters ◽

Operation Cost ◽

Water Meter

AbstractThe reduction of water resources due to climate change and the increasing demand associated with population growth is a renewed concern. Water distribution monitoring and smart metering are essential tools to improve distribution efficiency. This paper reports on the study, design, and implementation of a smart water meter (SWM) prototype, designed for mechanical water meters that need to undergo a retrofitting process to enable automatic metering readings. Metering data is transmitted through innovative narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) technology with low power, long-range, and effective penetration. A flexible power management design allows the introduction of an energy harvester that recovers energy from the surrounding environment and charges the internal battery. The energy harvesting feasibility was demonstrated with two proof-of-concept configurations, light and water-turbine based. The details on the performance of the proposed solution are presented, including the output voltages and harvested power. Although the energy harvesting technologies have not been integrated yet in commercial SWM applications, the results show that the integration is feasible and, once employed in a controlled environment, it can create business advantages by reducing the size and capacity of the internal batteries, enabling one to reduce the operation cost and mitigate long-term ecological problems associated with the use and disposal of batteries.

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