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Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
-
Paper ID:
IJSREM68332
Volume:
10 |
10 |
Oct 2026
Pages:
1-11
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.
Department of Electronics and telecommunication
Priyadarshini college of engineering
Department of Electronics and telecommunication
Priyadarshini college of engineering
Department of Electronics and telecommunication
Priyadarshini college of engineering
Department of Electronics and telecommunication
Priyadarshini college of engineering
Department of Electronics and telecommunication
Priyadarshini college of engineering
Ethanol-blended petrol is now routine in India, and an engine control unit (ECU) that knows the blend in the tank can adjust fuelling, spark timing and cold-start behaviour to suit it. The factory flex-fuel sensors that supply this information are costly and tied to particular vehicles, which leaves students, small workshops and retrofit users with few options. This paper presents a compact prototype assembled from inexpensive modules around an ESP32. An MQ-6 metal-oxide sensor responds to fuel vapour, and its analogue output is averaged and scaled into a relative ethanol indication. The same board measures temperature with an NTC thermistor divider, reads two axes of a GY-273 (HMC5883L) magnetometer as a rough motion cue, and takes position, speed and time from a NEO-6M GPS receiver. A 16x2 LCD and the magnetometer share one I2C bus, and the readings go to a ThingSpeak channel every minute over Wi-Fi. The circuit was built on a hand-etched single-sided board and run on the bench. On the evidence collected, the unit shows temperature, ethanol indication and magnetometer values together on its display, and it logged eight data channels to the cloud between 17 and 19 October. The ethanol value is uncalibrated, the temperature and GPS channels have not been checked against reference instruments, and no test has been made on a running vehicle. A calibration plan and a route to a real ECU connection are outlined.
KEYWORDS
This work built and bench-tested a low-cost ESP32 sensing node that shows an indicative ethanol reading, temperature and magnetometer values on a local display and uploads them, together with GPS position and speed, to a cloud channel. It confirms that such a device can be put together from inexpensive modules and that its parts communicate reliably over shared I2C, UART and Wi-Fi links. It also makes the limits of the vapour-sensing approach concrete. The next steps, in order, are: calibration with sealed samples from E0 to E100 in a fixed chamber with temperature compensation; validation of the thermistor and GPS channels against reference instruments; demonstration of the alert and event-tagging logic; replacement of the magnetometer cue by an accelerometer; and a capacitive or optical cell for direct liquid measurement. A connection to a real ECU over CAN or UART can follow once the message format of a target vehicle is available. A faster GPS update rate, SD or cloud logging of tagged events and long-duration vehicle trials would complete the move from bench prototype to field instrument.
Azhaganathan, G., & Bragadeshwaran, A. (2022). Critical review on recent progress of ethanol-fuelled flex-fuel engine characteristics. International Journal of Energy Research, 46(5). Eriksson, J., Girod, L., Hull, B., Newton, R., Madden, S., & Balakrishnan, H. (2008). The Pothole Patrol: Using a mobile sensor network for road surface monitoring. In Proceedings of ACM MobiSys. Espressif Systems. (n.d.). ESP32 series datasheet. Fraden, J. (n.d.). Handbook of modern sensors: Physics, designs, and applications. Springer. Hanwei Electronics Co., Ltd. / Zhengzhou Winsen Electronics Technology Co., Ltd. (n.d.). MQ-6 semiconductor sensor for flammable gas: Technical data. Zhengzhou, China. Honeywell. (n.d.). HMC5883L 3-axis digital compass IC. Mednis, A., Strazdins, G., Zviedris, R., Kanonirs, G., & Selavo, L. (2011). Real time pothole detection using Android smartphones with accelerometers. In Proceedings of IEEE DCOSS. Mohan, P., Padmanabhan, V. N., & Ramjee, R. (2008). Nericell: Rich monitoring of road and traffic conditions using mobile smartphones. In Proceedings of ACM SenSys. NITI Aayog. (2021). Roadmap for ethanol blending in India 2020-25. New Delhi: Government of India. Steinhart, J. S., & Hart, S. R. (1968). Calibration curves for thermistors. Deep-Sea Research, 15(4), 497–503. Tyagarajan, S., Pise, C., Kavekar, P., & Agarwal, N. K. (2026). Development of a flex-fuel engine for the Indian market (SAE Technical Paper 2026-26-0117). SAE International. u-blox AG. (n.d.). NEO-6 u-blox 6 GPS modules data sheet.
Publication Date
10/26/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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