Designers can toss out a plethora of sensors on a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to look at how much energy various devices in a facility are consuming, but unless all of them can be seen in real time, it’s hard to get a picture of what is really going on. Arch Rock (San Francisco, California) is releasing its new Energy Optimizer power monitoring system (Figure 1), which combines three technologies: the PhyNet IP-based WSN, specialized circuit-mountable energy sensors, and a new Web-based Energy Visibility Portal. Because it’s IP-based, both the control and monitoring aspects of the WSN integrate into the enterprise well, and the Web-based tools make analyzed, correlated real-time energy usage data available on a device-by-device basis in a comprehensive dashboard view.

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There’s a giant green roof at Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan truck plant, with 10.4 acres of plant cover helping reduce heating and cooling costs. Keeping the roof healthy is an ongoing program, and Onset Computer Corporation (Bourne, Massachusetts) is helping Ford’s facility management teams do that with their HOBO U30 weather station (Figure 2). These stations monitor soil moisture levels including stormwater runoff and general rooftop weather conditions, making their data available on the Internet in real time.

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Producing solar panels requires efficient and cheap development of highly pure silicon for solar cells and testing the final assembled panels to ensure their performance (see Figure 3). National Instruments (Austin, Texas) has been working with engineers at Siliken Renewable Energy (Paterna, Spain). Siliken is vertically aligned for all phases of solar cell development from silicon to panel installation, and has been using NI LabVIEW, PXI, and CompactRIO data acquisition hardware, sound and vibration software, and vision software at various steps in their production. As an example of the improvements, I-V characterization tests of the power output of solar panel modules have improved from just 30 points to 2,000 points, resulting in much more precise calibration parameters.

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