Wireless Measurement Application Introduction

From water, soil and climate monitoring to structural integrity monitoring of bridges and civil facilities, the emergence of wireless measurement systems has made it possible to reduce installation and system costs, increase flexibility, and simplify system deployment. Wireless measurement can also solve applications that were previously difficult or even impossible to solve using wired solutions.

Environmental Monitoring

Environmental monitoring includes checking the integrity of soil, water and air, regulating temperature and humidity in indoor storage environments, such as storing critical assets such as servers or fragile items. Outdoor environmental monitoring is important for industries such as agriculture, utilities and meteorology. Indoor monitoring applications include home or building automation, as well as retail or medical. Environmental monitoring also includes hazardous gas detection, which is important for industrial facilities or mining applications. Wireless technology expands these applications by enabling you to take measurements outdoors or over larger geographic areas.

The Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) is leading a project to collect environmental data in the rainforest. They eliminated the use of cables, which not only reduced costs but also simplified installation. Using NI technology, CENS scientists did not need to use power cables, traction cables, or build wiring infrastructure and measurement systems deep in the rainforest; they installed NI wireless sensor nodes, batteries, solar panels, and mobile modems to collect data over the Internet. They used Google Maps to locate the sensor nodes and record the deployment locations.

Learn more about Wireless Environmental Monitoring

Energy Monitoring

In today's global market, monitoring of resource production and utilization processes is extremely important. In order to reduce the impact on the environment and make more rational use of natural resources, we first need to accurately collect data and then make decisions and improvements based on the analysis of these data. Wireless technology is very suitable for these types of applications because it can easily realize distributed collection and can provide enough data to manage large systems.

For example, wireless measurement systems can establish a distributed monitoring solution for the power grid to measure energy consumption, detect faults, and evaluate signal integrity. Wireless technology is also applicable to the renewable energy sector, such as monitoring energy input, output, and environmental conditions of distributed solar or wind farms. Wireless technology can also be used in residential, commercial, and industrial buildings to accurately monitor energy consumption and provide data to utilities or end users to reduce energy usage.

Building Monitoring

Home and building automation is a growing industry that is well suited for wireless technology. Building automation systems are used within buildings to provide information about indoor environmental conditions, protect assets, reduce radiation, and control HVAC equipment or other systems. Many building automation integrators need solutions that can be easily installed in existing buildings to reduce the need for expensive infrastructure changes, which makes wireless technology more attractive than wired technology. In new buildings, wireless measurement and monitoring solutions can help users obtain LEED certification.

Machine Condition Monitoring

In a competitive market, equipment reliability, uptime and operating costs can greatly affect its competitive position. Monitoring health indicators such as mechanical, vibration and energy factors is a widely used method to optimize predictive maintenance of machines and thus optimize machine reliability and availability. Using wireless vibration and energy monitoring devices, reliability engineers can solve cost issues that have been difficult to solve in the past. Wireless measurements are also suitable for machine monitoring applications that cover large areas or contain moving parts.

Learn more about Wireless Machine Condition Monitoring

Structural Health Monitoring

Engineers and scientists are using the latest sensing and measurement technologies to build smarter, safer civil infrastructure around the world. Wireless technology expands measurement technology by allowing engineers to measure objects that were difficult or impossible to measure in the past. By combining modular, commercial off-the-shelf wireless hardware and flexible NI LabVIEW graphical programming software, engineers can more easily and safely perform wireless measurements to improve the structural safety of the world's buildings.

The Ferguson Structural Engineering Laboratory at the University of Texas is solving the problem of monitoring and evaluating the health of bridges. In bridge monitoring applications, the deployment of wireless systems can eliminate the cost of cable installation and allow researchers to reuse hardware between different bridges, thereby reducing the total hardware cost to taxpayers for bridge measurements. Wireless solutions that abandon cables also solve the problem of vandalism such as intentional cutting of cables.

Learn more about structural health monitoring

Distributed temperature monitoring

Distributed temperature monitoring is an application that spans multiple sectors. Food and beverage suppliers must keep perishable foods at a certain temperature throughout the cold chain. Pharmacies, hospitals, and other healthcare-related facilities must monitor and control the temperature of blood, medicines, and equipment. Retail stores and supermarkets must properly store perishable foods during transportation, in warehouses, and on shelves. Ingredient manufacturers also need to regulate the temperature of manufacturing facilities. NI wireless systems provide high-precision temperature measurement and can be combined with powerful data management software such as DIAdem to record the temperature of these products as required by law enforcement agencies.

transportation

Growing populations, especially in large cities, have created more interest in monitoring and managing parking and transportation. To draw valid conclusions and build more efficient transportation systems, you must collect and analyze data from existing systems. Wireless measurement and monitoring solutions can be used to track the behavior of pedestrians, vehicles, trains, and subways; NI software can be used to visualize and analyze the data. Such monitoring systems typically cover large geographic areas and are often located outdoors, making wireless technology an attractive solution.

Wireless measurement systems are an ideal way to direct traffic to open parking areas. To achieve this, a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) successfully deployed a parking space monitoring system based on the NI wireless sensor network (WSN) platform to monitor vehicle entry and exit events in the parking lot, wirelessly transmit the data to the NI CompactRIO base station for information processing, and transmit the information to a network database.

Industrial Monitoring

Industrial monitoring refers to the process of monitoring and controlling different machine equipment, factory or production status and recording data into the enterprise system. The fierce competition in the production industry has prompted people to continuously improve the speed of equipment, making people pay more attention to machine and automation efficiency as well as performance and quality control. Wireless technology can help you improve the process by adding new measurement methods to the system. Using a centralized, real-time equipment health data collection system and an email or SMS alarm system, a wireless monitoring system can greatly improve the continuous working time and reliability of machinery and equipment, helping instrument manufacturers win more market share.

Medical

Wireless solutions can be used for property or temperature monitoring in hospitals and temperature monitoring in blood banks or pharmaceutical companies. In addition to these building and temperature monitoring applications, wireless technology is also ideal for patient monitoring or alerting medical professionals when life-threatening conditions occur. Wireless systems can also be used to monitor patients in home settings or in ambulances and send important information to on-call doctors.

Learn more about NI wireless measurement devices

Wireless technology offers the following advantages over wired solutions: reduced installation costs, increased flexibility, and the ability to perform measurements in new or previously difficult environments. These advantages help engineers and scientists create new measurement applications, provide smarter infrastructure, and offer solutions that were not possible in the past.

To learn more about selecting NI wireless measurement products, read the Wireless Measurement Product Guide.