Piston pumps can be tested with the piston pump test rig (PPTR). More information about the test rig can be found here. An ESP8266 microcontroller reads information from a number of sensors and controls the installation.

The pump is running Monday to Friday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The running time, the number of strokes and the number of pumped liters to be tested is periodically published on the Internet; at the moment ThingSpeak is used for this.

The PPTR has a lift height of 12 meters, in other words the pump must overcome 1.18 bar of pressure. The pumping speed is adjustable.

The pump strokes are adjustable up to a maximum of 34 cm and are currently set to 22.4 cm.

Raw data as of November 14, 2018 (old system): https://api.thingspeak.com/channels/549045/feeds.csv?start=2018-11-14 00:00:00&offset = + 01.00

Raw data as of May 21, 2019: https://api.thingspeak.com/channels/789144/feeds.csv?start=2019-05-27 00:00:00 & offset = + 01.00

Realtime data

The graphs below are updated every minute with the status of the installation. Note that the first graph (motor speed RPM) only shows the nominal speed and that can be far from accurate these days (~ 10%).

Totals per day

The graphs below show the results of the tests every other day.

Force sensor – coming soon…

The force transducer provides a relatively high-frequency signal that ThingSpeak cannot parse. To view the accurate graphs, plug the microcontroller’s USB cable into a computer and use a Serial Plotter. See below for an (old) example. There might be an awesome system with data from the ESP with its own MQTT server in the future.