Challenge

Inventprise faced the very real challenge of ensuring that they never run out of gas supply, as doing so would put their processes, samples, and research at risk of being lost. Their main challenge was making sure they were using all of the liquid in the LN2 Dewars that were provided by their gas supplier without running out. In order to have confidence they would not run out, they were overscheduling refills and exchanging them every week even though they knew they were returning the container with a quantity of unused LN2 still in it. They also faced the challenge of having to monitor several types of gas containers including Dewars and High-Pressure CO2 Cylinders. They were hoping to find a system to monitor all of these applications on the same platform, at a cost they could manage within budget.

Solution‍

Working with Vendor Managed Gas (VMG), a telemetry monitoring system that combined sensors and manifolds for their High-Pressure Cylinders with a Liquid Cylinder Floor Scale with built in telemetry was specified. The patented Auto Reserve Fill Smart Manifold (Fig. 1) connects a Primary High-Pressure Cylinder to a Reserve Side Cylinder. When the Primary side runs out, the manifold automatically switches to the reserve side cylinder to ensure continuous supply of gas. Once switched, the telemetry (Fig. 2) notifies the user that the Primary is empty so that a change out can be scheduled. When the Primary is replaced with a full cylinder, the Primary automatically takes over and equalizes the pressure in the reserve. This way only the Primary ever needs to be swapped out, which reduces inventory on site, and the handling of cylinders. The Liquid Cylinder is monitored by weight using a low-profile floor scale with built in telemetry (Fig. 3). The low profile and easy to load ramp make loading and unloading easy and safe for the customer. All values from all telemetry components transmit to a central cell collector via secure LoRa RF technology. These signals are then transmitted to a secure cloud platform where Inventprise can view their data (Scale example in Fig. 4) and receive automatic alerts and warnings to ensure they will never experience a disruption in LN2 freezer fills, or in their facility gas supply.

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