Development of real-time monitoring system using wired and wireless networks in a full-scale ship

In the present study, the real-time monitoring system is developed based on the wireless sensor network (WSN) and power line communication (PLC) employed in the 3,000-ton-class training ship. The WSN consists of sensor nodes, router, gateway and middleware. The PLC is composed of power lines, modems, Ethernet gateway and phase-coupler. The basic tests show that the ship has rather good environments for the wired and wireless communications. The developed real-time monitoring system is applied to recognize the thermal environments of main-engine room and one cabin in the ship. The main-engine room has lots of heat sources and needs careful monitoring to satisfy safe operation condition or detect any human errors beforehand. The monitoring is performed in two regions near the turbocharger and cascade tank, considered as heat sources. The cabin on the second deck is selected to monitor the thermal environments because it is close to the heat source of main engine. The monitoring results of the cabin show the thermal environment is varied by the human activity. The real-time monitoring for the thermal environment would be useful for the planning of the ventilation strategy based on the traces of the human activity against inconvenient thermal environments as well as the recognizing the temperature itself in each cabin.