Scholarly record

CALIBRATION OF A LOW-COST 3D PRINTED RAIN GAUGE UTILIZING AN OPEN-SOURCE ARDUINO PLATFORM

Ing. Peter Valent, PhD, MSc.

Abstract

The monitoring of precipitation amounts plays an important role in the estimation of water balance as well as in the understanding of complex hydrological processes taking part in a catchment. High spatial and temporal variability of the rainfall could have a significant impact on the reliability of the performed hydrological analyses, which puts an increasing demand on sampling frequency and density of monitoring network. This is especially important in the case of small catchments, often with a small number or no monitoring stations at all, and local analyses where higher sampling frequency is a must. The relatively high cost of the commercial rain gauges, communication systems and post-processing software is the main reason why the collection of the precipitation amounts and the density of the monitoring network is still a challenge especially in developing countries. Latest advances in the low-cost open-source hardware and software sensor and electronics platforms together with the reduced costs and improved precision of 3D printers enable to design, develop and deploy custom low-cost measurement equipment. In this study a low-cost two-chamber tipping-bucket type rain gauge was designed and constructed. The electronics and the software of the gauge utilized an open-source Arduino platform, with the body of the gauge printed on a 3D printer using a fused filament fabrication technology, and an ABS thermoplastic polymer. The study describes the construction of the gauge and the function of the control software. However, the main goal of the study was to evaluate the precision and accuracy of the gauge in laboratory conditions and to calibrate a volume of water needed to tip the bucket from one position into another. In order to reduce the uncertainty the proposed laboratory experiment was conducted several times with various artificial rainfall intensities. The results showed a small variance in the values of the estimated volumes needed to tip the bucket as well as a clear positive relationship between these values and the rainfall intensities.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2017/31/s12.010

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