Immergas

Immergas, a leading Italian company for the manufacture and marketing of gas boilers, needs to automate the calibration process of gas counters with the aim of reducing any human error and minimizing the intervention by the technician.

Automated system for gas meter calibration

The Goals

Immergas is a leading Italian company for the manufacture and marketing of condensing and traditional gas boilers.

Immergas executes a periodic calibration process for all the gas meters of its research center. To perform this test a number of meters are connected in series to a reference counter (master). Thanks to the connection in series the same amount of air flows through all of the counters under test. The calibration procedure has to verify that the meters under test measure, within certain tolerances, the same value.

This procedure requires the intervention at regular intervals of a technician for the duration of some days.

The need of Immergas is to automate the calibration process of the counters in order to reduce human errors and to minimize the intervention by the technician.

Solution

To automate gas meter calibration, T4SM developed a custom application for Immergas that directly communicates with iDaq, a configurable and expandable software for acquisition, visualization and logging of data, also developed by T4SM.

iDaq is installed on a laptop, it acquires the signals from CompactDAQ, a National Instruments electronic equipment, and pilots a proportional valve for flow control.

CompactDAQ is a portable, rugged data acquisition platform that integrates connectivity and signal conditioning into modular I/O for directly interfacing to any sensor or signal.

In practice, the operator inserts the serial numbers of the meters to be calibrated, charges suitable points of calibration and starts the test. The application handles all the details of the calibration process by following the inserted points. After the test, the application automatically generates a report containing the measurement data acquired during the entire process for all meters under test. Thanks to these reports it is possible to determine the respective calibration curves. 

Solution diagram

Benefits and Results

With the solution proposed by our team all the goals have been achieved. The main benefits experienced by Immergas were in particular:

• Great time saving;
• Elimination of human error, so big gain in the precision of the test;
• System simplicity: the test is no longer bound to the presence of a qualified technician;

The system does not require continuous monitoring by a technician.