Flexible GPS/GPRS based System for Parameters Monitoring in the District Heating System

Energy consumption for heating purposes accounts for a significant part of the budgets of individual and collective users. This increases the importance of issues related to the monitoring of heating energy flows, analysis of flow parameters, verification of fees and, in the first place, minimization of energy consumption. The goal of this paper is to develop, by employing Global Positioning System receivers, measurement techniques that are suited to the continuous monitoring of the heating substation parameters. This paper presents the design and implementation of GPS/GPRS (Global Positioning System/General Packet Radio Service) system for low power data acquisition using MSP430 Texas Instruments microcontroller for monitoring of the heating substation parameters. The system is implemented in heating stations for a temperature and pressure monitoring. It contains GPS/GPRS gateway and 8 analog sensor inputs. Acquisition module and the server base station are suitable for industrial applications, home applications and for other appliances. The proposed measurement procedures, which are different from commercially available measurement units, are based on general-purpose acquisition hardware and processing software, thus guaranteeing the possibility of being easily reconfigured and reprogrammed according to the specific requirements of different possible fields of application and to their future developments.