When the Finnish nuclear power plant Olkiluoto 3 had to make a sudden shutdown on 19 November, CheckWatt‘s virtual power plant Currently was one of the balance resources activated, instantly providing the grid with 22 MW as frequency support.
Currently is a virtual power plant that aggregates and coordinates thousands of distributed batteries to act as one flexibility resource. Currently supports grid balance services like FCR-D up/down and FFR but also energy arbitrage and increased self-consumption.
The monitoring work performed by IoTBridge in relation to the railway bascule bridge in Vänersborg, Sweden has now been published in a scientific paper. The paper describes the safety assessment processes and the underlying ideas behind them, the challenges encountered, and the developed monitoring dashboard for visualisation of results.
It also explains how the system assesses the structural health of the bridge and how machine learning algorithms were used to automatically detect damages.
IoTBridge is now sharing a dataset related to the damage to the bridge in Vänersborg that was recently detected by the structural health monitoring system. The bridge is a single-leaf bascule bridge carrying railway traffic over a canal. It has been monitored by the system since 2021, continuously collecting data from strain sensors, accelerometers, an inclinometer and a weather station. The cloud-based service developed by IoTBridge was used to survey the bridge, and our routines for damage detection discovered a damage event in March 2023 that led to the bridge’s closure.
The dataset contains sensor data from the steel bridge and is unique in terms of the development and testing of routines for damage detection. It contains readings before, during and after the verified damage.
The bascule bridge carries railway traffic over a canal
CNet is participating in the LoLiPoP-IoT project which is aiming to improve the battery lifetime and energy harvesting of wireless sensors that are retrofitted in IoT applications for monitoring purposes.
Consisting of 40 European partners, the project is creating an ecosystem of developers, integrators and users to develop power platforms which consider power/battery life, ease of installation and maintenance. Focus is on three main application areas: Industry, smart mobility and energy efficient buildings with use cases for asset monitoring & tracking, condition monitoring for predictive maintenance as well as environmental monitoring. The development of platforms enables reuse across multiple applications and projects.
CNet leads the specification and requirement work for the 10+ use cases, contributing to the development of use cases for district heating and smart buildings.
Apart from reducing the power consumption of sensors, the project will also demonstrate cost reductions, optimised asset management and improved comfort levels for building occupants.
