Cold-chain monitoring for labs, vehicles and buildings
A fridge is close to a Faraday cage, and running a cable through the door seal defeats the point. LoRaWAN got the temperature data out without breaking the enclosure.
The problem
Cold-chain monitoring needs accurate readings from assets specifically built to block heat transfer and outside conditions. Refrigerators and freezers behave like Faraday cages, which restricts Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a wired sensor usually means running a cable through the door seal — potentially compromising the controlled environment it is there to protect. Vehicle and remote-site installations added a second problem: they depended on reliable 3G or 4G, and although a roaming SIM can reach several networks, network-selection behaviour could still cause outages.
What was done
Sensors were installed inside the monitored fridge, freezer or controlled environment and communicated out over LoRaWAN to a gateway. The gateway linked the local sensors to a cloud monitoring platform, with cellular backhaul where a fixed connection wasn't available or suitable. Smart Roaming was used to improve how the gateway selected and moved between cellular networks.
How it turned out
The system provided remote monitoring and alerting for temperature-sensitive assets across laboratories, healthcare, pharmaceutical, food and drink and supply-chain applications. In one reported incident an ultra-low-temperature freezer at a research laboratory failed on a Saturday morning with nobody on site; the monitoring system raised an alert and the laboratory recovered the contents.
“We were able to quickly recover the contents, avoiding all losses.”
Deployed at the time
As named in the original case study. Some of it is superseded, or was never in our range.
- Robustel R3000-LG LoRaWAN gateway — we do not currently stock a LoRaWAN gateway
- Koolzone Qwantum temperature sensors, BS EN 60751 platinum probes
- Robustel Smart Roaming and RCMS
What we'd specify today
Current equivalents from our catalogue for this kind of site — not a statement about the hardware installed.
Where this came from
Based on Robustel and Koolzone material produced in 2020 and prepared as a PDF in early 2021. The source does not state the value or quantity of the recovered freezer contents, and gives no quantified uptime percentage or comparative cellular-performance result. The gateway used was the R3000-LG, a LoRaWAN variant we do not stock.