IoT Enabled Remote Tank Monitoring System
The Customer
Inox Air Products is one of the world’s leading integrated industrial gas companies and continues growing other business segments by leveraging existing capabilities and expertise. It also expanded into environmental and energy markets, focusing primarily on the emerging, high-temperature technology of cogeneration, trash-to-steam, and flue-gas desulfurization, as well as building a leading refinery hydrogen supply position.
Customer Expectations
Medical gas systems in hospitals are, in a word, lifesaving. These assemblies supply piped oxygen, nitrous oxide, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and medical air to hospital areas such as patient rooms, recovery areas, operating rooms, and more.
- Oxygen: Oxygen is used when patients require supplemental oxygenation due to hypoxemia and hypoxia.Pressures are kept around 380 kPa or 55 psi.
- Nitrous Oxide: Nitrous Oxide is used as an analgesic for pre-operative procedures. It is delivered to the hospital through the medical gas system at around 345 kPa, or 50 psi.
- Nitrogen: Nitrogen is often used to power up surgical equipment during various procedures and to freeze and destroy diseased tissue in dermatology and cryosurgery.
- Carbon Dioxide: Carbon dioxide is used to suspend or inflate various tissues and is used in laser surgeries with System pressures about 345 kPa, or 50 psi.
The client needed an IoT Solution that will show the amount of gas remaining in the different tanks. It should also show the operating condition of the supply station and the gas pressure applied to each area where the gas is in use.
The Challenges
Power Management & Data Collection: On-site, no managed way for powering the [Sensors + Wireless Nodes + Gateways] available & data collection was also a challenge.
Setup Local Wireless Network: Due to Availability of multiple tanks (closely placed) on each site required to setup a local wireless network architecture instead allocating Data/Sim card-based Gateway to each in order to reduce the future operational & maintenance cost.
Network Reliability:Client having almost 85% sites on remote locations. Therefore, un-stability of Network was the biggest challenge.
Security & 100% Data Delivery: Being related to Healthcare and Medical gases are lifesaving element, the security & 100% data delivery or accuracy of solution is utmost importance.
Minimum Operational & Maintenance Cost: The biggest fear of any IoT solution is operational cost. Therefore, client was also having the same perception.
Solution Architecture
Remote Tank Monitoring Solution Description
As it was priory clear by the client, the managed distribution of power (230v) supply would be challenge on-site.
Therefore, by keeping the same constraint hIOTron team had designed a separate dual functionality power adaptor to provide (5v to Hi-Node & 12v to Integrated Sensors) which worked as a Data acquisition unit.
It was very easy & simple to collect the data via Hi-Gate and send it to the cloud directly but due to heavy operational & maintenance costs, a 2nd approach (Data Sensors Hi-Node Hi-Gate hIOTron Platform User Dashboard) was taken and benefited well.
Therefore, a zig-bee mesh network was established to collect all the data from Hi-Nodes to Hi-Gate having the 4G-GSM card & pushed to the cloud whenever needed.
For remote sites, maintaining 24/7 device connectivity to the cloud is always the biggest challenge.
Therefore, auto-connect & remote reset Hi-Gate feature made this issue look very small means whenever Hi-Gate gets network back, it automatically connects to the internet without requiring any manual settings and also gives alerts before ending the data pack in the sim card. Provision to add Wi-Fi & Ethernet is also available in the case on any site if it is available.
- Being related to Healthcare industry, accuracy for security and data storage is uttermost important. Therefore, to maintain same
- Data Security:
- For data security within local (2.4Ghz) network: The encryption algorithm used is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a 128b key length (16 Bytes) in each & every node firmware.
- 100% Data Delivery: A local EEPROM/SD card is used in the gateway to store the data in case of unavailability of the network and once it gets back then it pushes all the records with their respective time-log (RTC is inside) to store the same on cloud in order to apply various business logic to see the results.
To Reduce operational cost & unify hIOTron solutions from others, major (80%) tasks/ Edge computing done on the Hi-Node itself such as conversion & Display of RAW sensor to formulated data rather following round-trip through cloud, Advance anomaly detection (Alerts such mail/notifications/messages only when threshold crossed or local device decision making) and some basic Machine Learning Models before sending data to Hi-Gate or Hi-Gate to Cloud.Whereas for rest 20% task (Which wasn’t possible on devices) performed on hIOTron IoT Platform & Displayed on Dashboard with Mobile Application provision.
