Australian company Novecom has developed and implemented a range of continuous and remote environmental monitoring solutions that provide real-time reporting and data analytics across industries such as mining, manufacturing, construction, and renewable energy.

Real-time monitoring allows for proactive action to be taken in how companies manage their environmental risks and impacts, allowing for instantaneous and better informed decision making that supports accountability, builds trust, and protects against claims of greenwashing.

Novecom Managing Director Jeremy Pola told Green Review that real-time monitoring had proven to demonstrate the value of knowing what was going on in your environment.

He explained that ESG was still driven by environmental concerns, such as waste (reduce, reuse, recycle), biodiversity and energy transition, but was emerging in Australia as a must for many organisations and would become a differentiator for consumers and investors.

Pola said: “Managing your environmental obligations and stakeholder expectations cannot be done with snapshot retrospective monitoring – better business decisions can be made based on timely, reliable data. “Compliance is no longer only about prescriptive threshold-based assessment; increasingly, compliance expectations are being driven by technology and the ability to have access to performance data 24/7. “As such, compliance is about social responsibility, or social licence, and threshold limits are the last tier of performance assessment.

“I think the most important factor industry needs to consider when demonstrating compliance is that when you have the trust of your stakeholders your job becomes a lot easier – lose that trust and demonstrating compliance becomes extremely difficult.”

Pola noted that the future of environmental compliance was moving towards lower-cost, higher density monitoring networks. He explained: “This provides the opportunity for more locations to be monitored in a cost-effective way and promotes the need for AI or other automated data analytics tools to do the heavy lifting in managing and transforming the data.”

Novecom’s customisable solutions, built on its proprietary SentineX and SynaptiX platforms, enable remote monitoring of noise, vibration, air or dust, water, blast performance and the weather, all in real time, to provide reliable data that supports ESG objectives and compliance obligations.

These solutions are provided as turnkey offerings from design, manufacture, installation and operation and are supported in terms of maintenance and operation by Novecom for the life of the investment.

Integral to Novecom’s monitoring technologies is its application of a range of connectivity and communications solutions, including commercial LTE, loworbit satellite internet gateways, and networked WiFi, LoRA radio communication, and microwave links.

SentineX is an embedded software application that manages the acquisition, aggregation, reporting and communication of continuous monitoring data from a variety of monitoring systems and transducers.

When integrated with hardware, the platform becomes a self-managed monitoring system capable of operating autonomously in remote environments, and includes advanced reporting functions. Complemented by the data analytic knowledge hub Sentelligence, a cloud-based web repository, SentineX is able to provide detailed data analytics to assist with understanding the relationships and catalysts to eventbased outcomes within production processes.

Another notable SentineX feature is its alarm engine, which allows monitoring data from various modules to be combined to construct complex alarm rules that are triggered when anomalies in monitored parameters occur.

Pola highlighted that SentineX had established a firm foothold in the mining and resources sector for its robustness and suitability to providing real-time, trustworthy operational intelligence. SynaptiX is a powerful Internet of Things (IoT) data acquisition and telemetry platform that sits within a compact and low-power module.

It features the ability to integrate many different sensors and devices with the Synaptix Collector, allowing the end-to-end platform to be customised to the client’s unique monitoring and control challenges. A recent example of Novecom’s monitoring systems providing a customisable, comprehensive solution was demonstrated through a noise complaint issue with a Queensland-based mining company. The miner was having difficulty understanding the complaints from a neighbouring landholder because when they visited the property, the noise could not be heard.

Novecom deployed a real-time noise monitoring system one afternoon, which by the next morning had sent an automated report to the customer’s inbox providing a very simple chart that showed the measured noise level and the time of the day.

Following a period of data gathering and correlation with what was happening in the operation, it was possible to establish real-time alerts to get immediate notification of significant noise events and quickly identify potential noise sources.

Not only was the wider problem solved, but the quality of the data enabled the miner to better understand how to manage the number and location of its machines, providing an optimal fleet management arrangement to minimise noise impacts.

Pola said the key to Novecom’s value add was its understanding of what its customers needed. He added: “We work alongside our customers over time to ensure their investment in monitoring and data analytics is the right one for them and continues to deliver the insights that add value to their business.”