CASE STUDY
QualConnex
A cloud based data ingestion, monitoring, analytics, alerting and reporting tool for monitoring turbines in the field.
Wind turbine health monitoring
Keeping the lights on
When a multinational, known for real-time monitoring and maintenance of power generation plants across North America, was called on to extend their services to wind turbines, they turned to Snap 360.
Goals
Develop a web-based application that enables companies to securely monitor the health of their remote wind turbines.
Inside the beautiful, streamlined exterior of every wind turbine, complex machinery spins constantly, generating electrical power for an energy-hungry nation. To avoid downtime and expensive repairs, access to key metrics is essential.
Challenges
Remote locations
Unlike the massive generators at hydro-electric, fossil-fuel or nuclear plants, wind turbines are often scattered across remote locations – even offshore.
Thanks to Wi-Fi enabled sensors , their encrypted signals can be accessed remotely. But how to interpret data arriving from thousands of widely scattered sensors from multiple operators? How make it easy to read and understand?
Console design and programming
The complexity of the data, measuring variables such as temperature, hydrogen levels, amperes, oil levels and much more, requires sophisticated data processing to convert a mass of raw numbers into actionable intelligence. How could anomalies be detected remotely and alerts transmitted?
Availability
Near perfect monitoring uptime would be essential for operators to rely on the system’s ability to track and immediately report on any anomalies in order to keep the turbines running 24/7?
Security
Considering the eagerness of hostile nation-states and other bad actors to gain leverage over a country’s power grid, the web console and all data streams had to be hardened against potential subversion.
Solution.
Planning and Design
Working with our client’s team of engineers, analysts and sales execs, we began by researching the priorities and technical requirements, then developed a detailed technical blueprint of data processing, use cases, and other key requirements.
Planning and Design
Working with our client’s team of engineers, analysts and sales execs, we began by researching the priorities and technical requirements, then developed a detailed technical blueprint of data processing, use cases, and other key requirements.
Web Portal Tip of the Iceberg
Combining outstanding interface design with complex back-end programming, our team developed a web portal that interprets and consolidates streams of raw data arriving from thousands of remote sensors. Meaningful readings are now available for analysis by company, location, turbine and metrics.
Easy to navigate, read and grasp at glance, each company’s equipment status, both real-time and historical, is charted visually and numerically.
Users can drill down for hard numbers, set priorities, scope and alert levels. Application administrators onboard new power companies, each isolated from the others. Company administrators manage their own users.
Web portal tip of the iceberg
Combining outstanding interface design with complex back-end programming, our team developed a web portal that interprets and consolidates streams of raw data arriving from thousands of remote sensors. Meaningful readings are now available for analysis by company, location, turbine and metrics.
Easy to navigate, read and grasp at glance, each company’s equipment status, both real-time and historical, is charted visually and numerically.
Users can drill down for hard numbers, set priorities, scope and alert levels. Application administrators onboard new power companies, each isolated from the others. Company administrators manage their own users.
Testing, Testing, Testing
Can the numbers and charts be relied upon? Do the alarms go out when they’re supposed to? Careful analysis of report data was critical to ensure accuracy. Regression was testing applied robustly to identify and correct any edge-case anomalies prior to deployment.
Testing, Testing, Testing
Can the numbers and charts be relied upon? Do the alarms go out when they’re supposed to? Careful analysis of report data was critical to ensure accuracy. Regression was testing applied robustly to identify and correct any edge-case anomalies prior to deployment.
Cloud Hosting on AWS
For security and reliability, this application’s hosting was provisioned across geographically separate AWS datacentres. Load balancers manage traffic while maintaining continual availability.
Security
All data processing, application code and databases communicate internally within a private network within AWS, isolated from the world. Public access to the web portal front end is carefully controlled, guarded by multiple firewalls and rock-solid coding. Remote sensor signals are encrypted end-to-end. Defense in depth.
Wrapping things up.
Outcomes
Now serving a number of companies, each monitoring their turbines’ status in real time or watching for trends. Secure in the knowledge that they’ll be alerted immediately in case of trouble, they can focus on their day-to-day business growth.
Our client, for whom this application was developed, can now continue to expand and sell their vital monitoring service to new customers expanding wind power generation across the country.
Enterprise-level hosting, distributed across multiple AWS data centres, supporting solid application code developed by Snap 360, has provided 100% availability since launch in 2023.
Conclusion
While the web application in your future may not be this complex, rest assured that you can count on any or all of our competencies to take your company to the next level.
- Networking
- Enterprise hosting configuration & management
- Database design
- Application programming
- User interface design
- Deep performance and accuracy testing
- Security: defense in depth
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