Development of rain intensity sensor

Abstract

Rain intensity is one of the important parameter for the meteorological field. Currently, the sensor that commonly used is the Pluviograph Dines Tilting-Siphon. Pluviograph is capable to record the rain intensity and also the amount of rain. The problem of this sensor is during the siphon process the amount and intensity of rain is not measured. Besides, the sensor did not give real time reading and it is a conventional sensor that output is not in electrical to obtain the advantages of modem computing and display devices. In this paper, a rain intensity sensor with remote monitoring system is designed, fabricated and calibrated. The objective for designing this sensor is to give real time reading and make the output of the sensor in electrical signal. This sensor used the kinetic of rain water to measure the rain intensity because the kinetic of rain is analogous with rain intensity. The design sensor used a water wheel as a transducer to convert the kinetic of water into voltage. Then the voltage is converted to frequency so that it is easy to interfere with the electronic monitoring devices such like computer or oscilloscope. The designed sensor is successfully developed and it is able to give real time reading with the sensitivity of 2.3489 Hz/ ml -1 s