Design and development of a data acquistion and monitoring system

In many fields of operation, manpower is a crucial factor but nevertheless, there are still lots of wastes and losses. There are various reasons for different kinds of operations. It may be due to the failure of the equipments, human factors and etc. To be able to find out the cause of these problems, data acquisition system can be designed and implemented in many different ways depending on the criteria of the operations. In this project, data acquisition system (SCADA) has been developed for logging data from the powerful digital multimeter also called a “POWER METER” to take measurements of the energy consumption, and other electrical parameters such as Phase/Line Voltages, Phase/Line Current, Phase Power Factors and etc. There are different kinds of power meters in the market that can store data in a memory card but the cost will be significantly higher and hence a real time data logging power meter is used instead. Beside the power meters, other sensors and controllers are also used in the project so that it can acquire different kinds of data from different sources. With this, all these data can be acquired and stored in an internal relational database. With the knowledge, being a control engineering student myself, I have implemented the control portion by making use of the Omron Programmable Logic Controller to control the logic of the various motors, exhaust fan and lighting through the interface of a serial RS-232 cable. With these controls, anyone can turn on/off a device with just a click on the mouse. With the theme of energy conservation in this project, the data that are stored in the database can be extracted and generated into daily, weekly or monthly reports for analysis. Upon analysis investigation completion by the energy management team, energy consumption can be revised by controlling the PLC controller in the project to turn on/off a device if it is not required. A SMS/paging service is also implemented and it can send out alarms and receive commands through SMS. These will alert the operators or control the equipments if operators are not available or situations are crucial.Bachelor of Engineerin