Industry
Industrial / Naval
Solutions

Remote management

Monitoring

Automation

The "Isla de Flores" is a remote island close to the coast of Uruguay. It features an old lighthouse, still in operation,
as well as several scientific instruments installed, monitoring tides and measuring corrections for DGPS systems. The remote data is sent over cellular network to servers in the country. The island doesn't have access to the electrical grid and generators (although started daily to power the lighthouse) are not a sustainable form of power supply
for the installed equipment.

The original system used several battery banks, charged by solar power or by battery chargers when the generators where started. Decision on what power source or battery bank
to use was made by personnel on the island, but this prompted several problems:
       - The selection had to be made on the top of the lighthouse, were the transmitter is installed. This made access to the selectors cumbersome.
       - It required a fault to happen to note that a change had to be made. Only when a transmission was missed, personnel on mainland noticed that one of the power supplies had failed, and radioed the operator in the island to switch supplies.
       - Since faults were frequent, the battery banks spent a lot of time fully discharged, and this put exceptional wear on the cells.
       - Service had unacceptable downtime.

To remedy this, an electrical control panel was designed to automate the decision making, selecting the best supply available, and allowing to remotely monitor the status of all supplies,
as well as manually override the selection if needed.

The panel used an RTU, supplied by Nettra, which uploads all information via MQTT/cellular to a server, and interfaces with a dashboard to present data and allow for configuration and manual override.
The RTU gathers information on power supplies via a 4 bank monitoring module, built by Kalil for the naval market, but which was also a perfect fit for this project.

The result was an absolute improvement, allowing for no downtime since its installation, as well as identifying defective battery banks before they where a problem.

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