INNOVATION January-February 2013

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Awesense’s Wireless Monitoring for Power Grids Goes International

Jean Sorensen

“There are other devices on the market,” acknowledges Slamka, but these devices lack the ability to send informa- tion wirelessly and require manual retrieval of the data. Someone has to literally scramble up the poles and read the monitors each time the information is needed. This older generation of monitors couldn’t “talk to one another,” says Slamka, so collecting information along a transmission line can be labour intensive. One Raptor can communicate with other Raptor devices within a kilometre range, affirms Steiner-Jovic. If 10 monitors, each a kilometre apart, are located along a distribution line, the information from the unit that is 10 kilometres away can be drawn back through a network that includes the other nine units and transmitted to a person on the ground. “The system itself has many components; it is in-depth and complicated, but to the user it’s extremely simple,” remarks Steiner-Jovic. As the Raptors communicate wirelessly, the data collector grabs the information and senseNET interprets the data. “The focus on creating simplicity for the end user is what drove a lot of the design and engineering decisions.”

One of the first times that Mischa Steiner-Jovic, EIT, and Rick Slamka, P.Eng., placed their prototype wireless remote monitor- ing device on a high-voltage line to measure current flow—look- ing like a huge clothespin—the unit’s core had a melt-down. “We had kind of anticipated that—although we didn’t really know why,” said Slamka, chief scientist for Awesense Wireless, the Vancouver company founded by CEO Steiner-Jovic that is breaking onto the international scene with a technology solu- tion that pinpoints power loss for utility companies. The product consists of the hardware monitor known as the Raptor, a USB wireless data collector; and the software portion known as senseNET, a smart sensor platform. The senseNET system takes the data sent from one or more Raptors, compiles it and helps utility companies quickly spot losses and ineffi- ciencies in their distribution grid. The early version of the monitor that had worked on some high-voltage lines but then stopped has since been reconfig- ured. “That’s when the real challenges started,” said Steiner- Jovic, as the Awesense team hunkered down to eventually solve the problem of wireless monitoring of high-voltage lines with a new Raptor design.

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