To ensure safe operation of any industrial facility, condition monitoring is essential. Any parameter going outside its normal can lead to reduced productivity all the way to incidents and accidents having a drastic impact on the environment and the population.

Today, there is a wide range of sensors allowing the operators to safely know the state of their facility. However, for quite a few of these sensors, they are working on battery or are mechanics based, forcing regular predictive maintenance to ensure they would meet their specifications.

Periodic maintenance is expensive as it requires on-site technicians to regularly walk across the plant. For some sensors in hazardous areas, additional constraints must be accounted for, increasing the costs of this type of activity.

Nowadays, there is a wide range of passive sensors, called “leave and forget”, not requiring battery or maintenance by design. These sensors bring essential added-value to any industrial site as they drastically lower the costs by removing the need for predictive maintenance and offer higher reliability than active sensors. In addition, it can also allow the operators to monitor new parameters that were not available before to be monitored, anticipating the failure of specific equipment. An example could be an unusual temperature increase in an electrical cabinet, the first sign of risk of an electrical surge. But also the monitoring of moisture in waste drums, temperature excursions in sensitive packaging, etc. Passive sensors also help connect the physical world to the digital one. Parameters could be displayed live in digital twins of nuclear facilities without sharply increasing the costs of maintaining these additional new sensors.