Smart-Genie: An IoT-enabled Predictive Health Monitoring System for Power Generators

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology seamlessly integrates physical devices with the digital world, thus enabling us to remotely sense, analyze and control physical parameters with minimal human interaction. This smart ecosystem, being nurtured by the exponentially growing IoT systems, fosters efficient and automated decision-making, user-friendly operations through remote management, real-time situational awareness, and cost-effective predictive maintenance. Engine- generators (Gensets) extend electrical power in remote field areas and also offer a backup power service in case of temporary power outages. Monitoring of Gensets is an integral component of the management program of any organization. A dependable remote monitoring technique is always preferred over manual and on-site methods as the former provides a real-time and automated assessment of Genset's health conditions, thus enabling condition-based maintenance through predictive reporting of performance deteriorations. This research presents Smart-Genie, an indigenously-developed and IoT-driven automated solution for remote health monitoring of Gensets. Our solution can easily be integrated with existing `dumb-generators', thus equipping maintenance personnel to remotely monitor and analyze its health-conditions in real-time through a rich set of parameters. The observed parameters are reported to the authorized staff over the internet, through an android-based GUI (GenMonitor). Smart-Genie was deployed on field generators at our university campus for a trial period. The parameters reported by the system proved very useful in predictive identification of generators' malfunctions, besides significantly reducing operators' workload.