Lufft is a German manufacturer of weather stations, sensors, and management systems for distributed remote installations. They specialize in road condition monitoring for the European freeway systems, where weather, visibility, road ice and water film, can influence safety and allow operators to restrict speed limits as appropriate.
These remote weather stations must be reliable due to the high cost of field servicing, and so Lufft has specialized in sensors with no moving parts such as ultrasonic windspeed and direction, and Doppler radar precipitation rate, type and total. While in Australia we do not need the intensive monitoring of road conditions, it is becoming more common to monitor weather conditions around industrial installations, sewerage treatment plants and dams. In these applications reliability is important for the same reason as it is in Europe – the high cost of field service.
In order to allow simple integration of the weather station into SCADA, DCS or PLC systems, a protocol converter has been developed to make the data available on Modbus TCP/IP networks. This is almost universally accepted by Industrial devices. Weather station data can thus be logged, and displayed on the plant control system, and not as a separate system, so it is easy to relate events to existing weather conditions, and to set alarms, where weather conditions affect the plants operations.
A concise description of the UMB system and the standard sensors and weather stations including WS series, is available on request. These remote weather stations are available from ECEFast .