The purpose of warehouse mapping studies is to analyse temperature and humidity distribution, to evaluate storage conditions and identify critical zones inside the warehouse. This article intends to be a quick guide for warehouse mapping studies.
Overall Approach
Even with controlled environment inside the warehouse, the exterior weather conditions may influence the overall storage temperature and relative humidity. Because it has many costs to monitor many points continuously, particularly in big areas, the best approach is to perform this study at the worst case conditions, meaning two complementary studies performed respectively at winter and summer time. With these two studies, the critical zones can be identified to be monitored continuously.
First steps, start by collecting all necessary data about the warehouse: drawings, dimensions, HVAC plans, walls and ceiling materials, and storage organization. This will be extremely useful to choose the location of your dataloggers and prepare the protocol. The protocol should describe the procedures to be followed, including the number of dataloggers to be used and respective locations, the study duration, data acquisition intervals, data processing methods and acceptance criteria. Make sure you have enough dataloggers and that the sensors are calibrated.
Dataloggers location
You should set the number of dataloggers to use according to the warehouse volume. Try to use as many as possible to ensure a good distribution, but take into account that you will also have much data to analyse afterwards. Make sure you cover all storage areas, and all storage levels, including top levels. Locations near outside doors, walls and ceilings may be more sensitive to exterior conditions. To ensure a good distribution of the sensors, you can for example divide the warehouse into smaller equal sections. Put a sensor in the outside to record exterior conditions during the study.
Mappings
Use the same protocol for both winter and summer studies, with the same datalogger locations, data acquisition intervals and study duration. The study should be long enough to show any possible daily trends, so it should be not less than 3 days. Program the dataloggers to acquire data every 10-15 minutes (also the smaller data acquisition interval, the more data you have to analyse).
Data processing
For each location calculate the maximum, minimum, average, standard deviation and mean kinetic temperature. Usually the software associated to your dataloggers does these calculations for you. It is useful to make a plot with all locations results to see any overall trends. You will also see if there are any differences between lower and top locations. With this data is now possible to identify any critical areas, hot or cold spots, and analyse if any changes are needed.
Reports
Attach to the reports drawings with your dataloggers locations, all obtained results and calibration certificates. After performing both winter and summer studies, write a summary report compiling the main results and conclusions from both studies.