The Oklahoma City Air
Logistics Center Environmental Management Directorate (OC-ALC/EMR
or EMR) contracted with General Atomics (GA) to install and operate
GA’s E-SMART® system at Tinker Air Force Base. E-SMART®
is an automated environmental monitoring network system that characterizes
and monitors environmental contaminants and hydrological parameters.
The system is based on smart sensor modules and a digital networking
technology that can take advantage of most available communications
media. Through this distributed intelligence approach, an E-SMART®
system can automate the entire monitoring, data management, and
reporting process. E-SMART® thus replaces the costly process
of taking samples in the field at intermittent times (sometimes
months apart), transporting them to an analytical laboratory, and
performing an analysis. Instead, E-SMART® continuously reports
the data from sensors in the field to a website that can be accessed
24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thus, not only can the data be monitored
in near real-time, but adverse trends can be identified at an early
stage thereby allowing corrective action to be taken in a timely
manner.
The project began with a survey of candidate sites in conjunction
with a consideration of the environmental parameters that would
be measured at each site. The selection of the environmental parameters
to be measured was influenced by the availability of sensors that
would yield the desired data. This survey led to eight sites being
selected. A system consisting of approximately 80 E-SMART“
sensors was deployed at these eight sites under the direction of
the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center Environmental Management
Directorate (EMR). The parameters to be monitored at each site and
the location of each E-SMART“ sensor at each site were determined
in consultation with EMR.
The system was designed such that measurements from each of the
E-SMART“ sensors were accessible in near real-time in the
EMR offices.
The E-SMART® system demonstrated reliable network operation
while reporting a variety of environmental contaminants and hydrological
parameters from multiple sites, delivering the following benefits:
- Reduction of investigation and monitoring costs
- Improvement of timeliness of data
- Improvement in the quality of data interpretation
- Reduction of pollution prevention monitoring costs
- Improvement in the cost effective monitoring of existing contamination
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