Wide area sensor network for carbon footprint assessment

• Main Author: Tan, Gladys Jun Ying
• Other Authors: Ong Yew Soon
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/61974
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Manufacturing firms are large consumers of energy and energy consumption related expenses often forms up a large portion of operating costs. Energy efficiency is, therefore, the ongoing aim of these firms. Efforts to adopt energy efficient technologies has help them to achieve cost savings while adhering to the related mandatory legislations. Use of energy monitoring systems are example of solutions which enable firms to optimize their energy usage in manufacturing processes. Such systems consist of deployed sensors for monitoring and collection of real time data. However, existing commercial solutions are costly as they guarantee precision and long mean time to failure. Such solutions are unrealistic to adopt for the purpose of carbon footprint assessments. Therefore, an exploratory implementation of an inexpensive and non-invasive Wide Area Sensor Network (WASN) is proposed as an alternative to commercial solutions. A Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) manufacturing process was used as the supporting application context for the scope of this project to illustrate the implementation of the WASN. This project is a preliminary/feasibility study to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed WASN for monitoring and collection of data which would be used for carbon footprint assessment of a manufacturing process.