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GE Sensing selects Dust Networks as technology partner for wireless sensing solutions

ControlGlobal.com
04/24/2007

HAYWARD, Calif. and BILLERICA, Mass. (April 24, 2007) – GE Sensing, the sensing business of the General Electric Company, and Dust Networks, a provider of low-power wireless sensor networking (WSN) systems, have announced a technology partnership to build dynamic, flexible wireless sensing solutions for a range of monitoring applications.

GE Sensing, a design and manufacturer of sensing systems, 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.

“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.”

“We’re very excited to partner with GE Sensing to develop products that are highly reliable, provide ease of installation and operate on low power,” said Joy Weiss, CEO of Dust Networks. “As an enabling technology, WSN is ushering in a new information revolution, providing quick, reliable access to information from the physical world that was previously out of economic reach. Our partnership with GE has resulted in a product that delivers cost savings, energy reduction and increased efficiency benefits to end users.”

GE’s new Kaye RF ValProbe is the first product to be introduced from the GE and Dust Networks partnership. The RF ValProbe 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 can be used to verify system setup prior to studies, or to verify status at critical times during studies.

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.

GE Sensing serves the pharmaceutical, industrial, medical, process and transportation industries with a varied product portfolio that enables customers to sense parameters such as temperature, pressure, humidity, level, flow rate and gas concentration with a great degree of accuracy.

Dust’s network-ready SmartMesh products provide a complete WSN solution made up of motes and managers that are proven, scalable and easy to integrate for fast time-to-market applications. All SmartMesh products utilize TSMP, pioneered by Dust Networks, which serves as the foundation for the industry’s most reliable, low-power mesh architecture. Every mote in a TSMP-based network acts as a router, enabling simplified network installation and high reliability. Dust Networks’ products achieve more than 99.9% reliability in the face of harsh RF environments, and battery-operated motes typically live for more than five to ten years.