ABSTRACT

Water supply is one the most important necessity in daily activities, but, the water supply system to most households and offices in Nigeria are still operated manually. This leads to wastage of human resources as well as the inefficient optimization of the performance and life span of the electric pump. Also, due to the epileptic nature of power supply in Nigeria, there is always the limitations of human operations because of the inactive hours.

This thesis presents a design and fabrication of an automatic 3-way water tank filling system that would eliminate all the highlighted problems. The thesis also elaborated on the design and fabrication of the electromechanical valves which are simply a modification of a conventional gate valve by automatically operating the stud using a gear head motor, while the positioning and control of the maximum rotational angles are controlled using a set of micro switches.

The fabricated prototype as well as the electromechanical valves, were tested for their performance and were found to be very effective for a wide range of supply with pump capacity estimated at 1.5hp. The electromechanical valves are flexible and verys suitable for higher pump capacities.