Mohammad Ashadul Hoque is a director at Technovative Solutions, where he oversees the success and impact of various projects. As an expert in innovation management, he actively provides solutions for industrial and technological development. With 15 years of experience in control systems, Mohammad has also worked as an automation partner with Siemens AG, Germany. He is supported by a team with extensive expertise in energy and environmental projects.
Technovative Solutions Ltd (TVS), founded in 2012, is a technology incubator turning innovative ideas into reality, backed by research and development (R&D). Over the past decade, they have built valuable partnerships with researchers and collaborators to develop ground-breaking initiatives in various areas such as Digital Product Passport and LCA, Digital Healthcare, Materials and Manufacturing, Renewable Energy and Climate and Disaster Resilience.
Why did your company join the PowerPath project?
We are developing a data acquisition solution for the solar nano-grids deployed by consortium partner Nanoé in Madagascar, where, due to a lack of mobile network availability, existing off-the-shelf solutions can’t be used.
Our challenges in this project are establishing reliable LoRa communication between nano-grids and gateway situated about 8 km apart while complying with regulatory restrictions on transmit power (very low) and duty cycle. The challenges also include mesh communication between nano-grids and gateway, issues related to radio propagation (range, antenna positioning, antenna type, etc.), and data loss due to interference in the Radio Frequency spectrum.
We are developing a remote data acquisition system based on LoRa mesh network concept. The system will enable remote status monitoring and historical data collection of the nano-grids deployed by the partner Nanoé in Madagascar. This solution will remove the need for physical visits for routine data collection, sometimes even impossible due to road conditions.
How do you hope your company will benefit from participating in the project and its outcomes?
Our company will benefit from exploiting the data acquisition solution in vast areas with limited or no mobile network coverage worldwide. The LoRa mesh network-based data acquisition solution being developed by TVS will be used by project partner Nanoé in their solar nano-grid and micro-grid deployment in Madagascar. This solution can easily be adapted for other application domains as well.
As a company, we would like to scale-up, test, and optimise our solution for a larger geographic area with no current or near-future mobile coverage plan through future funded programmes employing this technology in other application domains.
How do these challenges relate to the expectations of the UK Industrial Policy?
These challenges relate to monitoring renewable energy sources, which are typically deployed in remote areas without mobile network coverage.
How is your experience in R&D and engineering informing your current work within the project?
My experience in control system design and development is guiding the development of the data acquisition system that fulfils the needs of project partner Nanoé beyond the PowerPath project, ensuring a system that can be widely deployed for their nano-grid data acquisition needs. For that, the system needs to consider the data bandwidth requirements, link redundancy and other design considerations related to a geographically distributed LoRa mesh network with large number of data collection points geographically distributed and redundant gateways.