Hot Wire Anemometric MEMS Sensor for Water Flow Monitoring

This paper presents an application based on a hot wire anemometric sensor in MEMS technology in the field of water flow monitoring. New generations of MEMS sensors feature remarkable savings in area, costs and power respect to conventional discrete devices, but as drawback, they require complex electronic interfaces for signal conditioning to achieve high performances and a high reliability. This anemometric sensor implementation has been developed with ISIF, a platform SoC, aiming to fast prototype a wide range of sensors thanks to its high configurable resources. The presented system achieves good performances with respect to commercial devices, featuring resolution of plusmn0.35% up to plusmn1.76% with repeatability roughly plusmn1% respect to the full scale (0-250 cm/s). Furthermore the proposed system, thanks to the compact size of the sensor, its robustness and its low costs can represent a solution for diffusive monitoring in water distribution networks.