Monitoring and sending alarms

Definition of tasks

The floors of a grinding works have already experienced multiple instances of leaks in the piping system. In one case where the pipe break occurred on the weekend, the damage was not discovered until the start of the Monday morning shift. Although the crack in the pipe was not especially large, the quantity of water that leaked into the plant was already enough to cause significant damage.

An easy to retrofit solution was sought for sending an alarm to a plant engineer in serious cases - preferably via cell phone.

The solution

The EDP service provider, who had already set up the networking of the CNC grinding machines, immediately saw that the already existing network infrastructure could be used if the W&T Web-IO were used.

The details

• 1. First the cell service provider enabled email receipt
  for SMS forwarding on the cell phone of the engineer.
  
• 2. Floor moisture sensors were connected to the digital inputs of a Web-IO which sent a signal via a potential-free contact when the situation is serious.
  
• 3. The Web-IO was plugged into a free Ethernet port and provided with power.
  
• 4. An IP address was assigned to the Web-IO.
  
• 5. The browser was used to configure the Web-IO so that an email is sent to the cell phone-specific email account of the engineer when one of the floor moisture sensors is triggered.
  

The network infrastructure and the gateway to the Internet were already set up in the company’s EDP system for other applications.

Of course the alarm can also be sent to any other email account if desired.

As the trigger for alarm all sensors and devices which have a potential-free contact or output a signal between -30V and +30V DC can be connected (switching threshold 8V ±1V). Other types of signals can be generated using relays.

Further practical examples: