Environmental Measurements

<What have you done in the last 25 years?> - series.

What:

A leading steel-producer in Europe, has an internal environmental department in their main Dutch site. They measure the content and quantity of the fumes in the major chimneys on the site using mobile lab trucks with gas analyzers. Multiple generations of these mobile labs are software integrated in the period 2000-2023 by my company.

Result:

The existing measurement method could be renovated and improved since 2000 by using different generations of more modern and accurate versions of a field measurement system. This was combined with specially designed monitoring/logging/analysis software to assist the environmental measurement experts.

How:

The existing mechanical setup and analyser-rack of the measurement system was integrated using a new computer, data-acquisition unit and custom developed software.

The original software functionality was recreated and improved to make the work of the measurement engineers high up in the chimneys or in the mobile laboratory easier and more transparent. This integration was done in the graphic software development system NI LabVIEW resulting in a Windows application that runs on a rugged PC.

Now:

It appears that the system is being replaced. Until now it was an in-house designed system from before 2000. My company applied for developing an improved version, even came up with a demo-version of it, but this proposal was not accepted.

Conclusion:

In-house developed measurement systems can play an important role in providing a quality- and cost-effective way of providing the necessary measurement data for a department with a dedicated task to do their reporting. Error-prone manual data-collection of loose instruments are a thing of the past. But also once engineered automated solutions can be made future-proof by upgrading to up-to-date technology that is fine-tuned to fit the character of the original design that has proved itself in reliability.

Call for action:

Companies interested in (investing in) similar type of projects may contact my company.