General Electric’s sensing business unit GE Sensing has partnered with wireless sensor networking (WSN) systems provider Dust Networks to build dynamic, flexible wireless sensing solutions for a range of monitoring applications. Consequently, GE Sensing will use Dust Networks’ embedded WSN products to provide GE customers with reliable, cost-effective wireless solutions to monitor and validate critical processes in a range of industries, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, automotive, industrial, commercial, petrochemical and power generation.

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“We evaluated many wireless technologies and ultimately chose Dust Networks’ Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP)-based products,” said Mark Kingsley, chief marketing officer at GE Sensing. “We believe Dust Networks is the only company that can provide the reliability and power consumption critical to our customers’ success. The ability to offer our customers a way to quickly and accurately gather information from multiple points will help them meet the growing regulatory challenges, leading to cost savings.”

The first result of this partnership is GE’s new Kaye RF ValProbe. It offers operators the option to view data in real time without the need or cost of wiring, and the ability to collect historical data from remote loggers. This feature is invaluable for verifying system setup prior to studies, or for verifying status at critical times during studies, stated GE Sensing.

The ValProbe system consists of RF wireless loggers, a base station and software. Data can be collected from many loggers and distributed over a wide area. Dust Networks’ TSMP-based mesh networking technology ensures that no data is lost by permitting loggers to route data to another logger for subsequent forwarding if the direct path to the base station is blocked.