Wireless Sensor Network for temperature and humidity monitoring in a nuclear facility

A Natural Convection Sodium loop named SADHANA was commissioned at IGCAR, with scaled down models of decay heat exchanger (DHX) and air heat exchanger (AHX) to study the performance of SGDHR system of PFBR. The 20m high Chimney develops the air flow required to transfer the heat from secondary Na to the atmosphere through the AHX. When the loop is in operation, the experimental study requires continuous monitoring of the temperature and humidity at chimney outlet (11th floor) and chimney inlet (5th floor) from the control room (2nd floor). Laying cables for long distance is cumbersome task in already established plant. Hence the Wireless Sensor Network technology has been introduced in the SADHANA facility. By introducing WSN, the redundant communication path was made available and the expenditure for cable laying and maintenance also reduced. This paper describes about the deployment details of the WSN, the need for WSN in SADHANA facility, the sensors installed, hardware details of the WSN node and signal conditioning board used, embedded programming, the GUI developed for this deployment and the measurements taken.