For technical and medical gases, remote monitoring is already and widely applied to fixed cryogenic vessels. On the contrary, remote monitoring of compressed storages has not been so widespread until now, as it requires more complex and expensive solutions which can often supply worse or limited outcomes.
There are two main reasons that have prevented the development of this interesting application. Firstly, compressed storage solutions are mobile, so telemetry units must generally be battery operated. This heavy requirement can be met by ultra-low power design, which ensures very long battery lifetime with appropriate numbers of samplings and transmissions.
The second problem is that mobile gas storages are much greater in number and less expensive than their fixed counterparts, meaning the investment becomes more challenging both as a total value and as a cost ratio between the telemetry unit and corresponding storage. Technological progress and new communication channels allow for the design of ultra-low power solutions and reduced data transmission costs today, however. The new data transmission standard NB-IoT (narrow band Internet of Things) provides several basic advantages for the remote monitoring of compressed gas storages: low power, wide coverage, cheap data transmissions and modem.
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