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Development of an Inductive Rain Gauge

Measuring weather data in an urban environment is an important task on the journey towards smart cities. Heavy rain can cause flooding in cities and prevent emergency services from reaching their destination because roads or underpasses are blocked. In order to provide a high-resolution site-specifi...

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Autores principales: Clemens, Christoph, Jobst, Annette, Radschun, Mario, Himmel, Jörg, Kanoun, Olfa, Quirmbach, Markus
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331685/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35897989
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22155486
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author Clemens, Christoph
Jobst, Annette
Radschun, Mario
Himmel, Jörg
Kanoun, Olfa
Quirmbach, Markus
author_facet Clemens, Christoph
Jobst, Annette
Radschun, Mario
Himmel, Jörg
Kanoun, Olfa
Quirmbach, Markus
author_sort Clemens, Christoph
collection PubMed
description Measuring weather data in an urban environment is an important task on the journey towards smart cities. Heavy rain can cause flooding in cities and prevent emergency services from reaching their destination because roads or underpasses are blocked. In order to provide a high-resolution site-specific overview in urban areas during heavy rainfall, a dense measurement network is necessary. To achieve this, a smart low-cost rain gauge is needed. In this paper, the current status of the development of an inductive rain gauge is presented. The sensor is based on the eddy current principle and evaluates the frequency of an electrical resonant circuit. For this purpose, a coil is placed under a metal plate. When raindrops hit the plate, it starts to oscillate, which changes the distance to the coil accordingly and causes changes in the frequency of the resonant circuit. Since the sensor is cost-effective, operates self-sufficiently in terms of energy and transmits data wirelessly via LoRaWAN, it can be used flexibly. This enables dense, area-wide coverage over the urban area of interest. The first experimental investigations show a correlation between the size of the rain droplets and the frequency change. Small droplets cause a shift of about 8 kHz and larger droplets of up to 40 kHz. The results prove that raindrops can be detected and categorized using this measurement principle. These data will be used as a basis for future work on calculating precipitation.
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spelling pubmed-93316852022-07-29 Development of an Inductive Rain Gauge Clemens, Christoph Jobst, Annette Radschun, Mario Himmel, Jörg Kanoun, Olfa Quirmbach, Markus Sensors (Basel) Article Measuring weather data in an urban environment is an important task on the journey towards smart cities. Heavy rain can cause flooding in cities and prevent emergency services from reaching their destination because roads or underpasses are blocked. In order to provide a high-resolution site-specific overview in urban areas during heavy rainfall, a dense measurement network is necessary. To achieve this, a smart low-cost rain gauge is needed. In this paper, the current status of the development of an inductive rain gauge is presented. The sensor is based on the eddy current principle and evaluates the frequency of an electrical resonant circuit. For this purpose, a coil is placed under a metal plate. When raindrops hit the plate, it starts to oscillate, which changes the distance to the coil accordingly and causes changes in the frequency of the resonant circuit. Since the sensor is cost-effective, operates self-sufficiently in terms of energy and transmits data wirelessly via LoRaWAN, it can be used flexibly. This enables dense, area-wide coverage over the urban area of interest. The first experimental investigations show a correlation between the size of the rain droplets and the frequency change. Small droplets cause a shift of about 8 kHz and larger droplets of up to 40 kHz. The results prove that raindrops can be detected and categorized using this measurement principle. These data will be used as a basis for future work on calculating precipitation. MDPI 2022-07-22 /pmc/articles/PMC9331685/ /pubmed/35897989 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22155486 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Clemens, Christoph
Jobst, Annette
Radschun, Mario
Himmel, Jörg
Kanoun, Olfa
Quirmbach, Markus
Development of an Inductive Rain Gauge
title Development of an Inductive Rain Gauge
title_full Development of an Inductive Rain Gauge
title_fullStr Development of an Inductive Rain Gauge
title_full_unstemmed Development of an Inductive Rain Gauge
title_short Development of an Inductive Rain Gauge
title_sort development of an inductive rain gauge
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331685/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35897989
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22155486
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