A diesel generator is the combination of a diesel engine with an electric generator (often an alternator) to generate electrical energy. Generally diesel generating units are used in places without connection to the power grid, for more complex applications such as peak-lopping, grid support and export to the power grid, as emergency power-supply if the grid fails.

Diesel engines are commonly used as mechanical engines, power generators and in mobile drives. They find wide spread use in locomotives, automobiles, construction equipment, and endless industrial applications.  Their usefulness extends to almost all industries and can be observed on a daily basis if you were to look under the hood of everything you pass by. Industrial diesel engines and diesel powered generators have construction, mining, marine, forestry,  hospital, telecommunications, and agricultural applications, just to name a few. Power generation for prime or standby backup power is the major application of today's diesel generators. 

 The most common unit of measurement on the Generator are Coolant Temperature, Oil Pressure, Fuel Level (Can help you monitor fuel theft), Battery Level, Running hours and many more. We can also command a Gensets to start or stop during emergency remotely.

Gensets typically come with a serial (or Ethernet) interface for communication. This could be a Modbus, BACnet or sometimes a Lonworks interface. We can read data from the Gensets using this interface and hence this interface enables 'remote monitoring' of the Gensets. In other words we can remotely read data from the Gensets without physically looking at the dial.

Building Management systems enable monitoring and control of all the equipment on a site on a single console. These systems are typically on BACnet IP. Generally it is required to integrate the Diesel Gensets installed on a site with the Building Management system for monitoring, historical data capture and control purposes. ProtoConvert can provide solutions to enable this integration. A typical example is Cummins control panel which support only Lonworks and Modbus and these Gensets typically need to be integrated with Building management systems on BACnet.

Why remote monitoring of Diesel Gensets?

• Monitor health and readiness.
• Alarm notifications
• Instant view of
  • Fuel levels
  • Oil-pressure
  • Battery voltage
  • Etc
• Minimizes the need for on-site service.
• Remote start/stop to verify operation.

Our gateways can provide a transparent communication channel so that your Building Management system (BMS) can read data from the Diesel Gensets installed on the site. Typically BMS support Ethernet based protocols like BACnet IP or Modbus TCP while the Diesel Gensets support serial protocols like BACnet MSTP, Modbus RTU or Lonworks. Hence the BMS cannot directly read data from the Gensets and there is a requirement for an intermediate 'protocol' converter.

We can provide a suitable protocol converter for your integration requirement. We will also help you commission our gateway on site and be your integration partner.

2) Remote monitoring of Diesel Gensets and data availability via GSM/GPRS and SMS alerts

Would you like to have access to your Gensets data on the go? Would you like email/SMS alerts based on consumption (or any other parameter)?

If your answer is yes, then we have the right solutions for you. Using our Netbiter suite of products we can push all the Diesel Gensets data onto our cloud based servers. Hence you can access your site's data from anywhere in the world using any web browser and internet.

Our GSM/GPRS gateways can provide SMS and email alerts based on live readings from the Diesel Gensets installed on site.

Netbiter comes with a screen which acts exactly like a SCADA. Shown below is a glimpse on how your Diesel Gensets model will look.

Some Added advantage of the product is as follows:

• Vendor-independent solution
• Preconfigurations for a wide range of control panels

• Woodward
• DEIF
• Deep Sea Electronics
• Kohler
• Basler
• SDMO
• ComAp
• Dynagen
• FG Wilson
• Etc…

• Quick installation – Less than 15 minutes
• Simple installation – No engineering or programming required on-site.

It is also GPS enabled (Optional) which can give you information about the exact location about your Gensets on world map. It can also show an alarm screen on the world map which looks like the one shown below.

Trending data and storing historical data. Netbiter comes with inbuilt screens for trends and data storage.

3) SCADA/HMI for monitoring and control:

Our Black Diamond SCADA/HMI can provide a single console monitoring and control solution for your requirement. We can display data from all the Diesel Gensets on site on a single console. It would also be possible to store data for future analysis, view trend screens for live data or for historical data and generate reports. Our SCADA can be used for local monitoring purposes.

                           Trend Screen on the SCADA will look like the following: