Summary
Client industry:
Medical vehicles, Surveillance vehicles
Challenge:
The client sought a solution that would smart enable their existing battery monitoring unit. Live transmission of the battery health, charging data and operational usage. Typically, these would be installed in Ambulances & Police Surveillance vehicles, which operate purely on battery power when at a scene.
Solution:
BlueCube IoT with accurate gas pressure sensor and data architecture platforms
BlueCloud. A Microsoft based information delivery backbone
Results:
Live battery health status alerting
Randomised data transmission rates (hide data heartbeat)
Faster response time to potential safety & quality issues
Lower cost of inspection
Unified information dashboard
Typical solution size (85mm x 110mm x 30mm) less than 300grms
Solution area:
Barnbrook’s BlueCube solutions help clients incorporate emerging technology into their technology offerings & business operations to help improve reliability, safer inspections and overall improve the service for customer experience.
The Details
The client had battery monitoring technology for local management of the battery powerpacks in the vehicles, but any degradation or failure of the batteries would not be noted until the vehicles were serviced or if total failure occurred. Because of the operational importance of the powerpacks the need to remotely monitor was critical to ensure that it could be supported easily. Live monitoring of the packs would allow predictive operation analysis to be done and bring the vehicle in before total failure occurred.
The BlueCube unit monitoring, as part of an initial activity were: –
Battery health
Battery charge rate
Battery usage
Overall health status
Environmental conditions
The company also wanted real-time alerts to better plan maintenance & support activities.
Matching solutions to desired outcomes
A central dashboard and smart APP technology made sure that the alerting and visual situation for each asset was delivered directly to the designated personnel for timely and appropriate actions.
Our server systems constantly analyse the incoming data streams and delivers ‘traffic light’ information. This ‘traffic light’ information together with event driven alerting allows activities to be planned in when appropriate and safe rather than a totally reactive support situation.
Addressing challenges
Live data transmission from remote locations can often be a challenge due to lack of inherent reliable data communications infrastructure. BlueCube products are totally self-contained systems, they can work equally well where there is a reliable data communication available or generate their own using GSM or Satellite.
For the surveillance vehicles it was paramount not to have regular data transmission patterns, so a randomised data transmission rate was development as well as further enhancing our data encryption & compression algorithms.
This ability to autosense the most expedient means to get data off the unit rather than the more traditional method of data logging delivers immediate benefits.
The client sought a solution that would enable real-time alerting if the servers identified an issue requiring maintenance or checking.
Delivering meaningful outcomes
The company partnered with Barnbrook to address all its challenges. Our Innovations team designed a solution around our BlueCube modular IoT and data architecture platform enabling vehicle battery monitoring, initiating real-time alerts, and streamlining maintenance activities, all delivered via our BlueCloud, Microsoft Azure based information delivery platform.
By partnering with Barnbrook, the client can transform its maintenance & support process to increase reliability & optimize its support network.
Barnbrook developed the IoT and data architecture platform to:
• Utilise our Azure cloud-based, scalable, and centralized data repository.
• Reduce the number of manual inspections needed and, consequently, reduce labour costs associated with inspection.
• Speed time to avoid operational issues without the need for frequent inspections, leading to a reduction in in-service incidents, costs and most important maintaining constant availability of clean drinking water.
• Accelerate time to discovery of conditions indicating a need for preventive maintenance in advance of a failure condition.
• Improve consistency and quality of inspections relative to the variation that can occur in manual inspections.
• Enable the collection of sufficient time-interval data to deliver preventive maintenance guidelines, further reducing incidents.
Maximising Investment
Barnbrook’s BlueCube range of IIoT solutions are of a modular and expandable design. As the units auto configure, adding another sensing capability can be as simple as plugging in another sensor and wait for the extra information to start flowing into the client dashboard.
This capability builds upon the initial investment into our solution.
Key Partners & Clients
● Porterbrook ● Angel ● Icomera ● DG8 ● Scotrail ● GWR ● Chiltern Railways ● Bombardier ● Merlin Power