First Manitoba Company to be named Finalist

SMT Research has been named a Western Canada Finalist for the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program’s (NRC-IRAP) Innovation Award in New Technology.

The award is given out by NRC-IRAP each year to recognize innovative excellence in the development, adoption and application of new technology in process or products by Canadian Small and Medium Enterprise’s (SME’s).

SMT’s win comes as a result of its design of a new wireless data acquisition system. This system allows the company to install sensors in existing buildings and monitor the building’s walls and roof for moisture, as well as other factors such as temperature and energy efficiency. The company’s software reads the data sent from the wireless system and notifies the building’s owner if moisture or other factors reach a critical level.

Wireless Structure Monitoring Technology has come of age to assist building owners, contractors, enclosure specialists, architects and engineers with building investigations, quality assurance during construction, and long term performance monitoring. More than just a data logger device - SMT’s System completes the following with ease:

• real time data collection from sensors on site & presentation to website
• automated analysis and threshold event settings
• Measurements over time—not just a sampling or for one point in time—but continuous data
• customized sensor and data presentation graphics
• results, graphs, graphics— available over the web interface, email reports, or XML data streams.
• SMT software algorithms correlate weather data to conditions seen by the sensors.

Areas of the building are usually under investigation for some time prior to determining the cause of the moisture accumulation in the roof, wall assemblies, or floor systems. A few parameters that can be monitored as part of the investigation are:

• moisture content in wood, moisture levels in gypsum, insulation, concrete & masonary
• condensation detection for interior glazing, wall, or exterior wall components.
• temperature detection
• wall and roof pressure (differential or absolute)
• relative humidity in interior wall cavities
• heat flux 
• indoor air quality monitoring for Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Monoxide
• Many sensors related to the building structure & the enviroment