Industry:
Energy/Power

Products:
Real-Time Module, FPGA Module, Single-Board RIO, LabVIEW

The Challenge:
Effectively controlling and monitoring energy parameters and the consumption of critical infrastructure and assets of an enterprise, especially in a scenario where there are multiple facilities geographically distributed in different locations.

The Solution:
Creating a rugged and flexible embedded power monitoring and control system for facility management based on NI Single-Board RIO and NI LabVIEW to reduce the energy consumption of large facilities.

As an integrated service and solution provider in embedded technologies, Saara Embedded Systems delivers embedded design and product development services to customers worldwide. We offer cutting-edge design and validation services, R&D support, solution design, engineering, project management, specialized technology, and system integration solutions. Because we are a National Instruments Alliance Partner, we can take advantage of the support provided by NI as well as our in-house design abilities to build a cost-effective end-to-end solution for our customers.

Embedded Power Monitoring and Control System

Our Remote Facility Management System (RFMS) precisely monitors and controls a facility’s or an infrastructure’s total energy consumption. It provides unconstrained real-time access to parameters from diesel generators, HVAC, signage boards, security systems, refrigeration equipment, lighting systems, uninterruptable power supplies, printers, beverage vending machines, and even single-switch or valve-based devices. With the flexibility of the embedded remote terminal unit (RTU), our customers can monitor and control different points on their infrastructures, making the RFMS an ideal system for effective energy consumption and optimization.

Since its introduction in India, the RFMS has reduced one of our customers’ energy consumption by 15 percent. With the implementation of the RFMS, the frequency of fuel replenishments has dropped drastically because replenishments are now based on a proactive on-demand system, fuel consumption accounting is accurate, and fuel theft issues have been addressed. Remote control features have delivered uniform switch-on and switch-off control of digital signage and air conditioning. As the number of RTU-installed branches increases, so does the power consumption savings. With the vast improvement in customer service quality due to uniform policies in its offices, our customer has gained a competitive edge as a pioneer in energy savings. Additionally, because of the performance of our RFMS, our customers are recovering the cost of our solution in six months through the energy savings.

Designing an RTU for Power Monitoring and Control

Hardware Solution Based on NI Single-Board RIO

We designed this customized embedded control and monitoring system based on NI Single-Board RIO and LabVIEW. NI Single-Board RIO is a versatile, high-performance platform that features an open architecture and the flexibility to build a proprietary custom I/O module to meet the specific I/O and communication needs of our application. We are using the NI sbRIO-9601 device that integrates an onboard, real-time processor; a field-programmable gate array (FPGA); and digital I/O lines along with Ethernet and RS232 ports and onboard storage for data logging. The RS232 port communicates to energy meters, and data from the remote systems can be pushed to the central server over various communication protocols such as TCP/IP or over secure wireless modes including ZigBee, GPRS, and CDMA.

Because of the flexibility and design of NI Single-Board RIO, we created a custom mezzanine daughter card and attached it directly to the mass termination digital I/O connectors. Our daughter card included custom signal conditioning to meet the I/O requirements of a variety of in-house sensors. These sensors monitor and control signals from different system parameters such as lighting, air conditioning, vending machines, diesel generating sets, and fuel reservoirs. The RTU can handle analog and digital I/O and acquire data from a variety of sensors and sources. We also created an enclosure for the NI Single-Board RIO device and our daughter card to easily deploy our solution in any environment. In addition, LabVIEW and NI Single-Board RIO also allowed us to easily add advanced features to our embedded solution for power monitoring and control including a Web-based interface to Google maps, wireless connectivity, and connections to a variety of analog and digital sensors.

Software Solution Based on LabVIEW

Our certified LabVIEW developers have successfully created an exhaustive yet simple GUI, which ensures easy deployment and a small learning curve for the our customers’ engineering teams. With the productivity of LabVIEW tools and the built-in UI capabilities of LabVIEW, we designed our system software in a short amount of time.

We used the LabVIEW Real-Time and LabVIEW FPGA modules to program the real-time processor and FPGA within NI Single-Board RIO. Using LabVIEW FPGA, we quickly programmed the FPGA to provide custom digital signaling to interface to our daughter card. With the Web publishing capabilities of LabVIEW and LabVIEW Real-Time, we added an advanced feature our customer can use to remotely view extrapolated data on the Web (data consists of energy consumption parameters and site-specific data) via industry-standard ASP.NET. The data is processed and can be presented over a Web-based GUI front end. This GUI can be viewed in an integrated dashboard and controlled over the Internet from any remote location.

Benefits of an NI Solution

Initially, our in-house design team created a custom RTU to meet power monitoring and control application requirements, but because of the dynamic nature of the project and the need for a scalable solution, we collaborated with NI. With the off-the-shelf hardware and software technology from National Instruments, we implemented a reliable and rugged solution that scales easily because of the flexibility and performance of NI embedded tools.

Additionally, because of the ruggedness and reliability the hardware and 24/7 support from NI, we created an RTU solution that works across different weather conditions and is compatible with a variety of communication service providers within the subcontinent. NI hardware and software also have built-in features for Web publishing and allow for remote updating and programming of the deployed systems, which is a major advantage for remote embedded control and monitoring solutions.

The robust NI system met our customer’s dynamic requirements. With the design mix featuring off-the-shelf NI hardware and software and Saara Embedded Systems sensors, daughter cards, and software integration, we designed and integrated a comprehensive energy management solution in record time.

http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-12139