Executive summary. Fuel theft is a major problem for companies that use fleet vehicles, since a lot of people see diesel as a form of currency. These vehicles run ...
DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTELLIGENT CONTROLLED FUEL AND ENERGY ALLOCATION AND LOCKOUT SYSTEM
A Riekert School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa Supervisor: Prof R Gouws November 2016 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Executive summary Fuel theft is a major problem for companies that use fleet vehicles, since a lot of people see diesel as a form of currency. These vehicles run on company fuel and the fuel is bought in bulk and is kept in tanks on site. Since it is easy to steal fuel from the tanks or vehicles for personal use an efficient fuel and energy tracking and allocation system is needed. A common practice of fuel theft is where drivers fill up a vehicle and then the fuel attendant is giving false slips and getting cash in return. The designed system must be able to identify the vehicle owned by the company and dispense a certain amount of fuel into that vehicle. This must then be recorded to a server with details such as the vehicle that was fuelled and the amount of fuel dispensed into the vehicle. This information must be sent to the user or owners cell phone the minute that the vehicle was refuelled. A PCB was designed to accommodate the 32 bit ARM processor along with a communication device and a small relay that will switch a bigger relay capable of handling the higher voltages of the fuel pump. Enclosures were designed for housing the MCU with a button for the user interface as well as an LCD screen for user feedback. Another enclosure design was done for housing the MCU enclosure as well as the flow meter which is used to measure the amount of fuel dispensed into a vehicle. A web server page was designed to allocate all the data gathered by the system for user to retrieve the data; this web page is also able to export the data. An enclosure was designed to attach the RFID reader to the fuel nozzle for registering vehicle tags on the system. An efficient program was designed to read these RFID tags, allocate them to vehicles in a list, and also able to identify a vehicle when the fuel nozzle is place into a vehicle and switching on the fuel pump while then counting the amount of fuel dispensed into the vehicle. The program is also designed to send an SMS to the user whenever a vehicle was refuelled. The development of this system took place in a UNIX environment; this was done on Linux OS. Also see other projects [1]-[3].
Project summary
References: [1] R. Gouws and T. Lukhwareni, “Factors influencing the performance and efficiency of solar water pumping systems: A review”, International Journal of Physical Sciences, pp. 6169-6180, December 2012. [2] R. Gouws, “Efficiency Analysis of an Induction Motor with Direct Torque and Flux Control at a Hot Rolling Mill”, International Conference on the Industrial and Commercial Use of Energy, pp. 64-68, August 2011. [3] W.A. Bisschoff and R. Gouws, 2014, ‘Die ontwikkeling van ’n superkapasitoraangedrewe voertuig vir die mynboubedryf’, SuidAfrikaanse Tydskrif vir Natuurwetenskap en Tegnologie 33(1), Art.#1187, http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/satnt.v33i1.1187.
