Recent advances in automated overfill protection and inventory monitoring
The entire industrialised world is undergoing a profound technology revolution which is dramatically benefiting the tank storage industry.
Never before have the demands for improved safety, environmental protection, and enhanced supply chain management been greater. It is indeed fortunate that recent and ongoing meteoric advances in three specific technologies have brought new and innovative solutions to our industry in such a timely manner. In the field of industrial automation, few breakthroughs have caused such intense product innovation as those brought about by spread spectrum wireless and lithium ion primary batteries. These have led to the development of ground-breaking new automation products in virtually every industrial discipline.
Another technology, magnetostrictive sensing, has also undergone a relatively recent revitalisation, which has allowed for even greater benefits to be realised as it now permits extremely highaccuracy yet power-efficient level measurement in the tall AST’s common to our industry.
Suitability of wireless systems Many in the industry have attempted, usually with dubious results, to employ various off-the-shelf industrial radio systems to transmit tank sensor data back to control points. Certainly, the benefits of reliable wireless telemetry are obvious to anyone who has purchased, installed, and maintained conventional hard-wired storage tank monitoring systems.
Unfortunately, most industrial wireless telemetry systems are not well-suited for storage tank applications. Many have suffered the frustrations of attempting to use the wrong radio technologies for this extremely challenging application. Most of these commercially available industrial wireless systems are optimised for continuously transmitting huge quantities of data at high speed over rather long distances (>5 km), and generally require line-of-sight between the transmitter and receiver.
This is certainly not the scenario required for storage tank monitoring. Companies need only transmit very small packets of data over relative short distances (<5 km; but rarely have the luxury of lineof- sight telemetry. High bandwidth and speed are not particularly advantageous, but data redundancy and robustness are absolutely essential to achieving the required reliability. Tank overfill protection is considered an extremely critical function wherein the failure of proper alarm enunciation can be life threatening.
