Fighting Fuel Theft on the Black Market using Arduino
The oil industry is lucrative, producing over 4 billions of metric tons of fuel annually. An industry as big as this one will, unfortunately, attract some corruption in the form of theft and the most commonly associated type of fuel theft is through the pipeline.
In a smaller oil crime variant, a group of Indonesian engineers had a slightly different problem. Thieves were stealing oil from vehicles by drilling a small hole in the oil tank and siphoning off the fuel. Fuel theft was enough of an issue that they decided to find a solution, and quickly, using some off-the-shelf components and sensors.
As an add-on to the project, they decided to use GPS sensing to track the vehicles and built a web app to watch the fuel levels. The idea was that if the fuel levels dropped sharply, they could immediately find the vehicle and apprehend the thief.
They decided that the popular Arduino microcontroller was the best fit to use as their central control system for tracking fuel levels — it’s easy to develop a workflow and the Arduino collects and displays data through the serial port with zero issues. It also has many handy libraries including one for GPS which helps the GPS shield (a shield is an add-on in electronics) work right out of the box.
They needed to find a way to measure the fuel level, and although they tried a solution using a float sensor on an arm, one sensor wasn’t able to differentiate level values continuously. So, they decided on using two ultrasonic sensors for redundancy communicating over Bluetooth.
Ultrasonic sensors are cheap and easy to get started with. Unlike the float sensor, they also perform continuously. An ultrasonic sensor works by emitting a sound (usually > 20kHz), then measuring how much time has gone by until the echo of the object is heard by the receiver. Ultrasonic sensors are versatile and able to sense most materials both shiny and matte. They are also unaffected by light.
Because of the location of the receiver, measuring the fuel level had a rate of 99% accuracy when the liquid was level, but the accuracy dropped to 84% when the liquid was tilted. Shown here is a system diagram of the solution that the five engineers designed to stop the oil theft. They take in ultrasonic sensor data through a central node (the Arduino) and transmit that data to a server/webpage so that anyone can monitor the level in real time.
Three test scenarios were created and all worked flawlessly, except for the tilted liquid test, which provided less accuracy than the flat measurement. They were able to conclude that when the liquid decreased as measured by the ultrasonic sensor and the Arduino, either leakage or theft was the culprit.
This Arduino-specific project shows how this hardware has the capacity to become the central hub of professional applications that solve substantial problems in the world. If you’ve ever considered building your own project like this one, the Ultimate Arduino Challenge is looking for you!
Enter here for the chance to win a free Arduino MKR GSM 1400 from Mouser Electronics and a trip to tour the Arduino factory in Turin, Italy. The contest is underway, and we want to see what you can do with this platform. Want us to showcase your project? Submit to: hardware@supplyframe.com
This project is from: Liquid volume monitoring based on ultrasonic sensor and Arduino microcontroller: M Husni et al 2016 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 128 012026.
