IoT Sensor to Detect Fraudulent Use of Dyed Fuels in Smart Cities

Abstract

Currently, the fossil fuels are the main source of energy for vehicles, which have associated different taxes. Certain activities use fuels with lower taxes and have a different color. There is the possibility of commit fraud by using the low-taxes fuel for private vehicles. In this paper, we present an IoT system to detect the presence of low-taxed fuels in the deposit of cars. Moreover, the system can send a message to the police to proceed with the denunciation if it is required. The sensor is based on the differences in light absorption by the different fuels, the normal fuel, and the low-taxed fuel. As a light source, we use seven Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs): white, green, yellow, orange, blue, red and infrared. We measure the changes in the resistance values with different LEDs with non-dyed diesel and dyed diesel. The results show that the resistance with diesel has different values to no-dyed diesel in all color LEDs. The white, blue, yellow and green LEDs produce the greatest relative differences of resistance with changes in 36%, 59.7%, 26.3% and, 32.3% respectively. Orange and red LEDs produce a variation of resistance of 6.2% for red and 4.4% for orange. Finally, the infrared photodetector does no present a variation of resistance. We select blue, green, and yellow LEDs because they have the highest difference of dyed and non-dyed diesel for the sensor. We used 3 LEDs to avoid false positive.