SHORT PAPER International J. of Recent Trends in Engineering and Technology, Vol. 3, No.

4, May 2010

Design and Development of Prepaid Energy Meter with Serial Data Transmission
Ravi Kumar Jatoth1, G.Ravikishore2
Department of ECE, National Institute of Technology-Warangal1, Sarada institute of science and technology, India2 Email: ravikumar@nitw.ac.in , hollyinstrument@gmail.com
Abstract This paper deals with design and development of Prepaid metering system for energy consumers and consumed energy data transmission to nearby station. It is also designed for data security and protection under adverse power fluctuating conditions. Prepaid metering system enable consumer to pay money in advance. After paying the amount, the clever card will be reprogrammed and this reprogrammed card will be inserted into the energy meter. The recharge unit ( clever card) in this system is designed with 8 pin electrically erasable programmable ROM using 93C46 IC The main advantage in this system is communication, this utility can eliminate manual meter reading and the bills can be paid in advance so that the consumer can plan his electricity bill well in advance. Index TermsPrepaid energy meter, Automatic meter reading, Microcontroller, Clever Card.

I. INTRODUCTION Electronic energy meter has got numerous advantages over the conventional electromechanical meter and due to this many countries of the world have switched to electronic metering [1]. Today's electricity companies are demanding more information from meters in the residential sector, where metering has typically been limited to kilowatt-hours. New features such as multitariff billing, reactive energy measurement and power quality monitoring are desirable to improve generation, distribution, customer service and billing. In order to accommodate the advanced requirements not available in electromechanical meters, this project gives electronic solutions towards the requirement. New energy measurements ICs (integrated circuits) are enabling accurate, dependable and robust meters with all the bells and whistles [2]. Electronic Distribution losses can be reduced with reliable electronic energy meters in a variety of ways. In the future, perhaps several years, India will need electronic energy metering for automatic meter reading networks. In the short term, many people expect that the rate of electronic energy meter adoption will quickly increase as the cost and number of individual components decrease and the reliability of the entire system increases. Eventually, state electricity Boards (SEB) will benefit from electronic energy meters in three significant ways. a).Reduce the cost of theft and corruption on the electricity distribution network with electronic designs and prepayment interfaces. Prepayment meters ensure energy meters now exist that measure current in both 9
2010 ACEEE DOI: 01.IJRTET.03.04.143

phase and neutral and calculate power consumption based on the larger of the two currents. As discussed below, these solutions no longer have to be populated with many components on a printed circuit board. Highly integrated solutions exist to reduce cost and improve reliability. b).Improve the cost and quality of electricity distribution through remote meter reading and efficient data management. Besides reducing the cost of manually reading meters, power outages can be detected, identified, and corrected more quickly for customers whose meters are communicating through a network. c).Environmental pollution is minimized by reducing the size of power generation equipment. Peak usage is minimized despite population growth through multiple rate billing and distribution cleanliness is maintained by monitoring power quality pollution contributed by individual consumers. II. PROBLEM FORMULATION Nowadays energy measurement and electric energy pilferage detection has become prime importance for the SEBs. All most all state electricity departments of India are facing same problem (pilferage). In the recent survey conducted by the state electricity departments, it is found that 20 to 30 percent-produced energy is non-accountable due to losses and it become a big subject for discussion, because of huge energy losses. Hence, the need has come to think on this line and a solution has to be emerged out. The potential for smart meters to offer consumers better information about, and control over, their energy use, leading to both financial savings and control over the energy consumption, has been discussed for a number of years. Advances have been made in developing the design and technology for smart meter systems although, to date, there have been no major pilot schemes to establish the costs and benefits to supply companies, consumers or to quantify any wider benefits in terms of meeting environmental/security of supply objectives slabs) per unit of electricity. The charge per unit of consumption varies from slab to slab. The charges go-up with increase in slabs. Thus this method of data collection has its own advantages and disadvantages. If the data collection is not carried out at a fixed interval, there is always a chance that the charges payable by the consumer is erroneous. By implementing this kind of system can eliminate bill collectors who is visiting each and every house for collecting consumed

SHORT PAPER International J. of Recent Trends in Engineering and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 4, May 2010

energy data. Now the consumer is responsible, such that he has to recharge his clever card by paying some amount at re-charging centers. The AMR system provides the utility with which much more functionality than simply reducing meter reading cost. Currently, electricity utility deregulation is taking place all over the world and many countries would require for a significant purpose of increasing revenue. III. AUTOMATIC METER READING(AMR) The meter picks up the usage and each time the disk on the meter turns it is recorded. Each day the meter transmits a usage report via the power lines. The usage report is sent through the power lines to a nearby distribution substation where it is transferred to the substation communications equipment. From the substation, communications equipment it is sent via the telephone lines to SEBs Customer Service Center, where it is used for billing and outage management [4]. The consumer energy meter is a special kind of digital energy meter, the consumed energy is converted in to square pulses and these pulses are fed to the digital counter through the micro controller for measuring the consumed energy. The clever card is interfaced with micro controller through the connectors provided in the system, such that the programmed card can be inserted in to the energy meter very easily. It is a detachable card, which can be removed easily from the energy meter when the energy is not required. Provision is made in the system such that, when the clever card is taken out,

automatically supply to the load will be disconnected. The overall system can be called as AMR (automatic meter reading) system. The main advantage of AMR system is that the consumed energy price can be calculated and at the same time price (amount in rupees) can be displayed automatically. The purpose of AMR is to eliminate the direct cost of manual meter reading and in addition provide value addition by data analysis. Currently, electricity utility deregulation is taking place all over the world and many countries would require for a significant purpose of increasing revenue. REVENUES ARE INCREASED BY: 1. Identifying theft of power - bypassing meters or Physical tampering. 2. Improving billing and revenue collection Methods. 3. Quantifying transmission and distribution losses. 4. Demands and distribution management. IV. BLOCK
DIAGRAM DESCRIPTION

For better understanding the total circuit, it is divided into in three units, Base unit, recharge unit and receiver unit. The base unit is shown in figure 1. The different blocks of base unit are electronic energy meter, digital pulse generator microcontroller, clever card keyboard LCD panel, load current sensing circuit high voltage sensing circuit

Figure1: Block Diagram of Base Unit

. A. Electronic Energy Meter In this block, AD 7751 energy metering IC is used. This block takes the proportional voltage, proportional current in a fixed duration so that the energy consumed E = V * I * T. . (1) 10
2010 ACEEE DOI: 01.IJRTET.03.04.143

Where E = Energy consumed, I = Line Current and T = Time.

V = Line Voltage,

V and I signals are fed to the metering IC AD7751, after stepping down the voltage under measurement with the help of step-down potential difference network using resistors and for the current, with the help of current

SHORT PAPER International J. of Recent Trends in Engineering and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 4, May 2010

transformer (basically this is a step-up transformer). The internal clock is constructed with crystal oscillator for counting the pulses. Thus the output ac signal is proportional to the energy consumed from the ac mains supply. In addition to the generation of ac output, this customized IC provides high accuracy, meeting international specifications, errorless than 0.1%. In this dedicated IC, it monitors continuously both the phase and neutral (return) currents. A fault is indicated when these currents differ by more than 12.5%. Then the billing is continued taking the larger of the two currents. The output of the IC is taken across pins 23 and 24 (f1 and f2) is the frequency signal proportional the energy consumption. This pulsating frequency is calibrated, i.e., 1600 pulses per unit of the electric energy consumption. A facility is provided in this IC to indicate fault conditions, two logic outputs are provided as fault and revp (reverse polarity), which can be used as fault. B. Digital Pulse Generator The main function of the pulse generator block is to converter the analog signal from the energy meter into digital pulse. The pulse produced by the energy meter is nothing but a peak pulse and this peak pulse is converted into square pulse. In this trigger card block, the frequency output of the energy metering ic, which is a differential signal is converted in to proportional dc signal with the help of a bridge rectifier. This signal is converted in to discrete electrical pulses with the help of an opto coupler. These pulses are treated as a clock pulses sub-sequent stage for counting /display purpose and monitoring the energy consumption with the help of microcontroller. C. Microcontroller In this work the microcontroller part is playing a major role, which is used to read and store the data received from the clever card. According to the received information from the clever card, the microcontroller displays the consumed energy information and at the same time energizes the relay and alarm automatically when the clever card passes the information, just before exhausting the energy. In this work three microcontroller units are constructed for the base unit as well as recharge unit, receiver unit. Micro-controller unit is constructed with ATMEL 89c51 micro-controller chip. The ATMEL AT89c51 is a low power, higher performance CMOS 8bit microcomputer with 4k bytes of flash programmable and erasable read only memory (EEPROM)[3]. Its highdensity non-volatile memory compatible with standard mcs-51 instruction set makes it a powerful controller that provides highly flexible and cost effective solution to control applications. D. Clever Card The clever card is designed with at93c46 is an 8-pin ic, this is a serial EEPROM IC reads data stored in memory at specified address and is able to erase or write all memory locations inside the chip. 11
2010 ACEEE DOI: 01.IJRTET.03.04.143

The main advantage of using this ic is, the data stored in EEPROM is not erasable even if the power fails. Each device can be used up to 1000 cycles (erase and read).The other advantage of using this device is, since it is having 16k memory, lot of data can be stored in a single device. The EEPROM IC is interfaced with port 1 of microcontroller chip through the connection. E. Load Current Sensing Circuit The current transformer is used with its primary winding connected in series with line carrying the current to be measured and, therefore, the primary current is dependent upon the load connected to the system and is not determined by the load (burden) connected on the secondary winding of the current transformer. The primary winding consists of very few turns and, therefore, there is no appreciable voltage drop across it. The output of the ct after converting ac into dc is fed to a/d converter. the output of the ct will vary according to the load current flowing through this CT primary and this variable voltage is converted into digital pulses and this digital information is fed to microcontroller which energizes the relay automatically whenever the load current exceeds its preset value. For sensing the load current, a current transformer is used as load sensor, which is connected in series with the load. For the demonstration purpose, for monitoring the load current, the ac lamp load is simulated in the project work. F. The Recharge Unit The recharging unit is designed with microcontroller, keyboard and LCD panel. In this section, the source of information is keyboard. The code produced by the keyboard by pressing the keys is converted in to digital code. Here the micro-controller is playing a major role for converting the logic signals into digital code. To detect a pressed key, the micro-controller makes high all rows by providing logic high at input, and then it reads the columns. If the data read from the columns all zeros, no key has been pressed and the process continues until a key press is detected. When any key is pressed, the micro-controller detects and goes through the process of identifying the key. Starting with top row, the microcontroller reads all the columns. If the data read is all zeros, no key in that row is activated and the process is moved to next row. This process continues until the row is identified. After identification of the row in which the key has been pressed, the next task is to find out which column the pressed key belongs to. The complete Circuit diagram of the recharging unit is shown in fig as below

Figure2: Block diagram of Recharge Unit.

SHORT PAPER International J. of Recent Trends in Engineering and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 4, May 2010

V. SIMULATIONS AND RESULTS: In this section the logic used in the implementation is explained. For this the algorithm is as follows ALGORITHM FOR RECHARGE UNIT Step1: Initialize the LCD & Keyboard Step2: Display PREPAID METER RECHARGE UNIT Step3: Check for the card Step4: If the card is not present then display PLEASE INSERT THE CARD Step5: Identify the consumer number Step6: Load the tens place of energy units Step7: load the hundred place of energy units Step8: Correctly entered press Y if it is wrong press N Step9: If Y button scanned then display PLEASE PRESS RCH Step10: If recharge button is pressed display REACHRGING, Then it display SUCCESSFULLY RECHED TO XY Units. A. RESULTS The hardware kit was tested with the loads of different power rating and the results were noted and are tabulated for easy reference. The table is as follows.
TABLE 1: ENERGY METER RESPONSE FOR VARIOUS LOADS s.no Load (watts) Line Voltage (Volts) 1 2 3 4 100 200 1000 200 228 230 230 250 Load Current (Amps) 0.44 0.86 4.4 0 8.46 4.53 0.43 --Time/unit (Hours) Fig-4: High Voltage Protection

From this graph we can say that for High voltages greater than 240V the circuit protection facility is ensured VI. CONCLUSIONS This paper discusses the design and development of microcontroller based prepaid energy meter with serial data transmission, Results are found satisfactorily. The system which is developed is more useful to the customer as he can monitor his energy consumption and can plan accordingly to reduce his consumption as per his budget. In this work only one electronic energy meter is used at the consumer side. But in practice, many meters will be functioning and all these meters (transmitters) can be tuned to a single receiver. So that, total information can be collected at centralized single point. Using the same transmitter, the other information, such as load current, line voltage at various places etc. also can be transmitted. This information in the form of pulses can be transmitted using analog FM. transmitter. At the receiving end a computer can be used instead of a microcontroller to store, to display, and to print the received information. To transmit the digital data, a different kind of modulation such as pulse code modulation can be implemented. The other important advantage of the system is that power pilferage can be minimized by identifying the tampered meter. A low frequency signal can be generated and transmitted in case if any one tries to tamper his meter. Since a low power transmitter is used, the range between transmitter and receiver is limited to 10 meters which can be increased by increasing the power radiating capacity of the transmitter. Using smart cards or memory cards, the system can be converted as prepaid system. REFERENCES
[1] Syed Khizar Ali Zaidi, Hura Masroor , Syed Rehan Ashrafand Ahmed Hassan , Design and implementation of Low cost Electronic Prepaid energy meter Proceedings ofthe 12th IEEE International Multitopic Conference, pp. 542552, , December 23-24,2008. [2] N.LOCI, F.MOSSI AND M.TOSI Virtual Instrument For Instantaneous Power Measurement,IEEE TRANS INSTRUM MEAS, VOL 41,NO 4,PP 528-534 Aug 2002. [3] The-8051:Micro-Controller, Architecture,Programming & edition) by KENNETH J. Applications (2nd AYALA,Penaram International Pvt Ltd [4] Paul Daigle The Latest On Electronic Meters Product Manager, Analog Devices, Inc, masseachusetts. [5] Rachel Kaplan, energy measurement ics simplify meter design . [6] Rajkamal, embedded systems architecture programming and design, 2nd edition. tata mcgraw hill, 2008.

From this table we can conclude that for high line voltages and load currents the hardware working satisfactorily.

Figure 3: Load versus time graph

From this graph we can say that for heavy loads the prepaid energy meter taking less time and for lower loads taking less time for deducting rupees from recharge card.

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2010 ACEEE DOI: 01.IJRTET.03.04.143