Air Force Road Heating Control
Replaced walk-down manual switching of anti-icing heaters with sensor-driven automatic control
- 01 노면 센서
- 로거 02 PLC
- Modbus 03 관제 서버
- 04 열선 제어
From a 700 m walk to remote automatic control
The only switch was on site — a soldier walked about 700 m to turn the heaters on and off, so they ran generously long and the power bill showed it. Sensors now feed a PLC through a logger, the server reads it over Modbus, and heaters run automatically on thresholds set by the client — safety criteria are never invented on the control side. Power cost fell 70%, and the system still runs.
Duty windows that account for warm-up and residual heat
Heaters neither heat instantly nor cool instantly. Operation starts pre-emptively before thresholds hit, and cuts early to let residual heat finish the melt — the duty window shrinks to what is physically needed. That window design is the substance of the 70%.
Thermal cameras and CCTV as an independent check
Every saving pushes toward heating less, but a missed icing shuts down a runway — the failure costs are asymmetric. Near-real-time RTSP CCTV and thermal imaging of road surface temperature give humans a verification path independent of the sensor logic, so icing risk never rests on one judgment.
Replacing LoRa with wire, and a dead-man cutoff in the PLC
LoRa proved unstable for a control line, so wired LAN was laid. A timer in the PLC shuts the heaters down on its own if communication stops — the fallback decision lives in the field controller, not the server. No communication trouble since.
Status
Delivered to an air force base and in operation since — built inside a closed network, worked directly from an air-gapped server room over a Linux console.