EcoMonitor – Exhaust Gases Continuous Monitoring System for Industrial Environments

EcoMonitor – Exhaust Gases Continuous Monitoring System for Industrial Environments

Abstract

A monitoring system is mainly used to record physical phenomena, usually through sensors or transducers, to process and represent acquired data.
As a result of their evolution, computers have now more applications in industrial environments, mainly due to the use of the virtual instrumentation philosophy, where data is gathered by generic data acquisition systems and processed by end user developed applications. The use of this concept together with available standard products, targets for a good cost/performance relation and an increased global productivity, due to ease of building and maintaining this kind of systems. One example of application is a continuous monitoring system.
Recently published legislation about environment, related to atmosphere gases emission, requires the industries with major combustion facilities to perform continuous monitoring and to periodically send reports per emission source to the authorities, in a previously defined format.
The EcoMonitor system completely fulfills all the legal requirements and gives the owner, Portucel Viana, the level of automation and flexibility required. This system is based on a server/client architecture linked through a computer network. The server functions include data process and archive, graphical interface with the user, and automatic generation of official and internal reports in previously defined formats. The client performs the continuous monitoring of electrical signals related to gases emission and their transmission to the server database. Both applications, server and client, are developed in LabVIEW and work on an Intel Pentium based personal computer, under Windows 95 or NT.

Final report prepared to obtain the Master in Science on Electrical Engineering degree.

EcoMonitor – Sistema de Monitorização em Contínuo de Emissões Gasosas em Ambientes Industriais
Instituto Superior Técnico
December 31, 1997