Smart Monitoring Systems

The smart monitoring systems are used to remove the mundane observations from a human observer and to report unusual application characteristics directly to supervisory personnel, who are often situated some distance away form the object being monitored. Smart monitoring systems often carry out safety critical applications and report to operators that a defined event has occurred.

Problem

Many applications, require large amounts of redundant information to be acquired in order to observe rare but characteristically important events, such as, for example vortex sheading effects around suspension bridge pylons, which only appears predominant when the wind is blowing from a certain direction. It can be very expensive to leave highly trained staff reviewing redundant information in the hope that a desired action will occur. A more efficient approach is to have the monitoring system contact the control staff when a specified phenomena has occurred and to present the results for analysis. Safety critical operations such as the monitor of suspension bridges for Torsional oscillations. Large numbers of people can be effected directly and indirectly should a bridge to close. The loss of life can be catastrophic if people are aloud onto a structure when it is under the influence of extreme conditions. Control staff, design engineers and government agencies can be alerted to adverse conditions as soon as they are detected. Information can be relayed directly to key personnel and remedial action authorised instantly.

Suspension Bridge Dynamic Monitoring System

Excel Results Display

Solution The NP4000 instrumentation can be easily combined to create self contained smart monitoring and control applications. The ease in which information can be integrated into third party applications ensures decision making tasks are kept simple. Management personnel who are familiar with common applications software such as Excel and Lotus 123 etc. can see information in real time on their screens just like a normal spread sheet. Communications software can direct event specific data directly to outside organisations. The easy integration of the NP4000 instrumentation and the ease in which data can be obtained ensures that knowledge based systems can be used to interrogate the results. The NP4000 instrumentation systems have been designed to allow for simple expansion or contraction to meet operational demands. This means that should a new event requirement monitoring, install plug a new unit, a single key press and applications packages extracting information are updated automatically to the system changes. The full functionality of the NP4000 instruments can be made available to remote access applications. On being informed that an event has occurred, remote personnel can control the instruments directly. Data can be supplied real time to external orginisations using simple network and communications technologies.

Applications

Remote Monitoring
Insurance 
Critical Safety
Civil Engineering 
Design & Test Centres
Universities
Laboratories

Departments

Research & Development
Quality Control
Production Engineering

Control System Display