Food manufacturing facilities, agricultural farms, chemical plants and other industrial plants use tanks and silos for storage of necessary processing ingredients or end product. Monitoring the levels of these steel storage vaults is essential for inventory control and safety. But, tank level monitoring is often a challenging task.
Containing hazardous materials or situated in inconvenient and remote locations, these storage chambers pose potential dangers and difficulties when taking manual readings. Even as wired sensor systems replace manual methods for tank level monitoring, cabling requirements, environmental conditions, multiple sensing requirements, and topography can present challenges depending on the application.
Wireless sensor control systems offer many advantages over wired systems that can improve the operational efficiency in monitoring tanks and silos while reducing costs. They are less susceptible to lightning strikes, eliminate cabling requirements, work in very remote locations, and interface with virtually any type of sensor. In fact, tank level monitoring is perhaps the most common application optimized with wireless sensor networks.
While known throughout the oil & gas industry for providing a reliable and cost-effective solution for monitoring tank farms, the SignalFire Remote Sensing System (SRFSS) is used in other industries such as farms, food processing plants and rail cars for wireless level sensing.
Here are some application stories that provide insights on how the SignalFire tank telemetry helped a variety of industries automate tank level monitoring with wireless and remote data acquisition capabilities.
A regeneration facility increased worker safety and efficiency by automating measurement of hazardous liquids in rail cars with the SignalFire Remote Sensing System. Previously, technicians used a measurement stick to determine the levels of sulphuric acid in rail cars, exposing them to acid fumes.
Tortilla Chip Manufacturer Automates Management of Cooking Oil in Storage Tanks
A SignalFire Remote Sensing System configured with a Pressure Scout offers a more accurate and safer alternative to manually gauging tanks to estimate volume in determining when to order new supplies of cooking oil and dispose of the wasted stock.
Wireless Monitoring of Farm Silo Levels
As farmers look to operate more profitably, many are adopting wireless technology to better track, control, and connect different operations. Whether a large dairy, small poultry or diversified crop farm, wireless sensor monitoring and control systems can automate the remote management of silo levels. More than automating data collection, these wireless telemetry systems are configurable to shut down operations or send an alert when reaching a threshold. Collected data is downloadable into analytics software for better asset management, such as calculating and analyzing feed storage costs in silos.