Humidity Control with Interactive Web Monitoring: A Cost-Optimal Solution for Printing Industries

Environmental parameters such as air moisture level pose a significant impact on the quality of prints. Although, solutions like industrial ultrasonic humidifiers exist to sustain satisfactory humidity levels but their cost overhead in small printing facilities becomes sometimes unjustifiable. In this paper a design based on evaporative misting principle is presented which in addition to being low-cost also incorporates modern remote monitoring technologies such as Web User Interface (WUI) over Wireless Fidelity (WiFi). For optimum coverage of printing facility, a sensor network is designed employing a custom protocol over RS-485 physical layer in a Single Master Multiple Slave (SMMS) topology. An electronic master controller is developed that co-ordinates with the sensor nodes located in different zones and accordingly generates control signals for actuators. The real-time remote monitoring over Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is accompanied with tools offering detail analysis of humidity profile of desired areas. All web services including live graphs and data logging are catered by means of Web Integrated Database Server (WIDS) hosted on a supervisory computer. Ultimately, the practical realization of the proposed design is accomplished by successfully executing the solution in a printing industry.