Archive for month: June, 2017

Towering Above the Competition

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Phoenix Fabricators and Erectors needed to cut a 100-foot water tank, add a 40-foot extension, then put the suspended piece back on. For a company with more than 30 years of experience in constructing, installing, renovating and rebuilding large above-ground water tanks across the US, the project should have been routine.

It was anything but. Call it a perfect storm combining hazards and challenges that most project engineers do their best to avoid. “We were limited by sight constraints,” says Kurt Fuller, Engineer of Record for Phoenix. “Our three large cranes had limited mobility and were set up on a very tight work site. On top of that, we were directly adjacent to a community high school.”

To read the full case study, click here.

For more information about the NAVIS Anemometer systems, click here.

What is wind turbulence

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Think about chaotic movement, unstable flow of wind… this is what wind turbulence means. If still not clear… remember last time you were on an airplane there was turbulences. Not nice.

Why is so important wind turbulence in any tall construction? Very simple, assume your hands and arms are the wind and a small bar of metal is a crane. Now try to bend it applying continuous force, you will probably bend it (unless the metal bar was too big to start with!) but it is very unlikely that the bar would snap. This is a continuous and steady flow of wind.

Now bend the metal back and forwards, you will see what happens very quickly.. the metal will snap in half (eventually). This is wind turbulence for you, a chaotic pushing and pulling by the wind on any structure and that is what it makes it dangerous.

Some of the windiest places in Scotland for wind turbines (like a crane, very tall structure) where it would be the perfect place for a wind mill, wind turbulence has stop some projects going forward because this chaotic (wind turbulence) flow of wind would eventually break the structure.

Weather and Agriculture – WINDCRANE Applications

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Bridging the gap between management and field operations

One of the main challenges in the agricultural industry is bridging management decisions and field operations. Agriculture involves harvesting crops in remote places, and it is only possible to take decisions based on real-time data if a reliable monitoring system is in place. It is important to note, however, that site conditions can be very demanding. Any monitoring system deployed in farmland must be able to withstand dust, rainfall and corrosion. In addition, access to energy is not always guaranteed and data must be transmitted reliably across large distances.

The food industry is subject to some of the most demanding standards and regulations, and meeting them without monitoring is practically impossible. In other words, weather monitoring has evolved from a luxury to a necessity for effective farming. In addition, the demand for food will only continue to increase. The UN estimate that the population will reach 9 billion by 2050, and 4 billion will be affected by water scarcity. The food industry must constantly increase its productivity to keep up with demand, all while reducing its environmental footprint and resource consumption. In other words, agriculture will have to feed more people with fewer inputs.

Conventional monitoring for weather and agriculture

The conventional monitoring approach in agriculture has been to install measurement stations evenly spread throughout farmland, and drive around each day to check their readings. However, this approach is very expensive in terms of man-hours and fuel consumption, especially when the route travelled is a few dozen miles long.

When using the new approach, where all measurement units are equipped with long-range connectivity, readings can be taken through a smartphone app or web dashboard. A centralised monitoring solution also provides a live snapshot of weather and soil conditions across an entire agricultural area, something impossible to obtain through the traditional approach.

Introducing Agri-Tech Logic Remote Climate Station

The Agri-Tech Logic Remote Climate Station is a monitoring solution tailored to the needs of modern agriculture. The system was developed through a joint venture between Logic Energy, the developers of WINDCRANE; and Agri-Tech, a leading provider of IT solutions for the agroindustry. The system has many features that simplify management decisions for farmers and landowners:

  • All data is delivered directly to a mobile application, as user-friendly charts and displays that provide actionable insight. Data can be downloaded in both Excel and CSV format.
  • The climate station can be equipped with a solar panel and battery, allowing it to generate its own energy and operate even during night-time.
  • GPRS/GSM capabilities provide long distance communication in any geographic location.
  • Automatic notifications can be configured for conditions such as extreme temperature, heavy rainfall and wind gusts.
  • The Agri-Tech Logic Remote Climate Station is a plug-and-play solution that requires minimal initial configuration. If a new unit is added to an existing network, it integrates seamlessly.
  • The system integrates with a cloud database, which ensures data will be preserved if the unit is damaged or if connectivity is lost.

Save Time and Fuel with Agri-Tech

One of the main benefits of the Agri-Tech Logic Remote Climate Station is that saves farmers time and fuel. You can forget about tedious and repetitive site visits and focus on productive activities and decisions. The system also provides improved visibility of weather patterns, allowing crop rotation and harvesting to be planned more effectively. Irrigation can also become more efficient when there is a real-time snapshot of weather conditions across the entire farmland. When you can assess the conditions of a site located miles away without there, the savings are immense!

The potential of a smart monitoring system is enhanced when coupled with automation. For example, irrigation can be automated and controlled based on site conditions, with data provided by the monitoring system. The agricultural industry will be forced to increase its water efficiency as supply is diminished. Farming currently consumes 70% of all portable water in the world.

Practicing with the Navis wind measurement system

Hitting the Mark with Navis Wind Meters

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California’s Jim Ramsay entered the Extreme Benchrest competition as an amateur marksman but he finished it by besting the pros. His not-so-secret weapon? A Navis Wireless Wind Speed Sensor. Even more impressive was that it was his first time in competition and he had less than two months to practice.

What is Extreme Benchrest?

Extreme Benchrest is an annual rifle competition held in Arizona and hosted by Airguns of Arizona and the Phoenix Airgun Club. Benchrest refers to the gun sitting on a gun rest, meaning the operator isn’t standing or sitting, isolating all the variables. “The competition comes down to trigger control, breathing, gun performance and individual interaction with the gun,” says Jim. “The biggest factor is the wind.” In the competition, all participants qualify at 75 yards. Four relays are held, two for each category. The top ten from each round are chosen to compete on the final day of competition at 100 yards. The target consists of concentric circles, with the largest circle being 5.25 inches in diameter. The closer a participant is to the center (a bullseye roughly the size of an aspirin tablet), the higher the score.

Measuring Wind Speed

Up until now, measuring wind speed at a rifle competition was done mainly through the use of wind flags. This is a skill in itself since it takes a lot of training and experience to equate the flags to a miles per hour figure. “Ballistics programs take into account wind speed, miles per hour and wind direction,” says Jim. This calculates a wind adjustment value. Jim wanted to apply that same principle in the competition and began by looking for equipment measuring wind speed that would be used in construction. He wanted a wireless one for the shooting range so it could transmit data back to his smartphone. An online search turned up Navis along with the supplier, BigfootCrane. “Even from reading the brochure online, it seemed to be exactly what I needed so I got a system sent out to me.”

What Set Navis Apart

The most valuable part of the software, Jim says, is being able to see a running average with a history over the previous two minutes. This let him gauge where the averages were occurring. When it came to Extreme Benchrest, he was able to base his calculations on the average then adjust for that particular, which gave him a very qualified window of opportunity. “There was definite strategy involved. I could watch the running history to see much I had to adjust, just by using the sighters to see when the wind speed would return.” Jim figures he was the only person using the Navis Wind Speed Sensor technology at the competition. One competitor had a hand-held anemometer but it was mounted to his rifle scope, which meant he was measuring wind there rather than at the target. This would preclude him from being able to factor in other variables like speed or velocity. Jim set his Navis anemometer at the one-third mark, which is where he believed the most influential winds were located. “Ideally, you want to have the system close enough to accurately characterize wind environment but not next to the table where you’ll get disturbances as the wind flows around things.”

“The Navis Wireless Wind Speed Sensor performed even better than I expected, providing me with accurate real-time information right in the palm of my hand.”

Hitting the Mark

After the competition ended, Jim was asked if what he was using was a weather station. It only took a few minutes to explai what he had and how it worked. Not surprisingly, he ended up exchanging contact information with people who wanted to follow up with him at a later time. He noted that while several of the pros belong to an older demographic, there were younger members of the crowd who were only too eager to embrace the latest technology. “The Navis Wireless Wind Speed Sensor was a big hit with everyone but I really appreciated it at a completely different level because I hadn’t had time to fully train using the wind flag system.”