Software — Gas quality monitoring
AME Portal
Know your gas. Prove it.
Water and hydrocarbon dew point, computed continuously from the instruments you already own — and recorded so thoroughly you can defend every number in a contract discussion. On your site, on your hardware, under your control.
±0.017 K
agreement with the industry reference engine, validated case by case
3
plant protocols spoken natively — Modbus, IEC 60870-5-104, MQTT
7 days
of network outage absorbed at the edge without losing a single measurement
100%
of results stored with engine, method and quality — nothing untraceable
The problem
Dew point surprises are expensive.
Liquid dropout, hydrate risk, off-spec penalties, custody-transfer disputes — they all trace back to the same gap: the chromatograph tells you the composition, but nobody turns it into a trustworthy, continuous, alarmed dew point at line conditions. Spreadsheets after the fact don't protect a delivery contract. A single off-spec event can cost more than years of monitoring done right.
How it works
From field signal to defensible trend, automatically.
01
Connect what you have
AME Portal reads your GC, RTU and transmitters over Modbus, IEC 104 or MQTT. No new field hardware — configuration, not engineering.
02
Compute, honestly
Each analysis cycle becomes one quality-checked composition, then water and hydrocarbon dew point and gas quality to ISO 18453 and ISO 6976. Suspect data is flagged, never silently used.
03
See it, prove it, act on it
Live dashboard and historical trends in any browser. Alarms with hysteresis reach the right people by email, SMS, Telegram or webhook — before a contract limit is crossed.
Freedom of physics
Your dew point, your choice of engine.
Most systems weld you to one calculation engine forever. AME Portal treats the thermodynamics as a replaceable component: run AME's own validated engine, or the industry classic GasVLe — selected per measurement point, even both on the same stream, side by side.
Why it matters commercially
If a counterparty questions your engine, you re-run the same data through a second engine and show the agreement. If a better model appears in five years, you adopt it — your history, trends and alarms don't change.
Why it matters technically
Every result records which engine and method produced it. Numbers from different engines are never silently mixed on a trend — a discipline auditors love.
Built for real sites
Every site measured. One place to look.
Compressor stations, storage fields, border points — each gets a small AME edge unit speaking to the local instruments. All report to one central portal: one database, one interface, one audit trail. Lose the link to a site? The edge keeps measuring, computing and alarming for up to a week, then fills the history back in — no gaps, no manual recovery.
Your data, open
A control room in your browser. A database you own.
The dashboard shows live dew points against contract limits, channel health and active alarms; trends go back years and load in seconds. Underneath sits open PostgreSQL — not a proprietary vault. Your engineers can query it, Grafana can chart it. If AME disappeared tomorrow, your data would still be yours, in a format the whole world understands.
Architecture
A cluster that heals itself.
Each site runs a small edge collector — industrial PC or virtual machine, the same binary. The central stack — ingest, gRPC services, notifications, the TimescaleDB time-series store and the Blazor UI — runs as VMs on a hyperconverged Proxmox cluster with Ceph storage: every disk kept in three copies across nodes. Patch a server by live-migrating its VMs away; lose one outright and the cluster restarts its VMs elsewhere on its own, in under a minute. No per-core licence, no single point of failure.
Edges: PC or VM
One collector binary per site, Linux or Windows. It measures, computes and alarms through a full week offline, then reconciles automatically.
Center: Proxmox HCI
Compute and storage fused across commodity nodes. VMs live-migrate for maintenance; a node failure costs nothing. Grow by adding a node, not by re-architecting.
Store + trends: TimescaleDB
Every snapshot is one hypertable row; continuous aggregates downsample server-side, so the dashboard pulls years of history in seconds — one open store for live, trends, alarms and audit.
What happens when a node dies.
No pager at 3 a.m., no restore from backup: the cluster already holds three copies of every disk and keeps a majority standing — it brings the lost VMs back on another node and carries on.
Why AME Portal
Built for plants, not for demos.
-
Numbers you can defend
Every result carries its full pedigree: engine, method, standard edition, data quality. When a number is challenged, you answer with a record — not a shrug.
-
Choose your physics
AME's validated engine or GasVLe — per measurement point, even side by side. No vendor lock-in on the calculation that matters most.
-
Your data stays yours
Everything on your premises — Linux or Windows, VM or hardware, no cloud required. Open PostgreSQL storage your tools can read, forever.
-
Survives bad networks
Edge units keep measuring, computing and alarming through a week of lost connectivity, then reconcile automatically. Remote sites are first-class citizens.
-
Alarms that mean it
Hysteresis and delay built in, so a value hovering at a threshold doesn't page anyone twelve times at 3 a.m. Acknowledgments logged: who, when, what they said.
-
Field-born, not lab-born
Designed by people who commission gas plants for a living. It respects how sites actually work: flaky links, mixed vendors, audits, and operators who need answers at a glance.
The honest comparison
What you're probably doing today.
| Capability | Spreadsheets | Historian / SCADA | AME Portal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Continuous dew point at line conditions | manual, after the fact | stores signals, doesn't compute | ✓ every analysis cycle |
| ISO 18453 / ISO 6976 compliance | depends who built the sheet | — | ✓ validated, versioned |
| Bad data handling | silent errors | quality bits, unused | ✓ flagged, propagated, visible |
| Alarming before contract breach | — | on raw signals only | ✓ on the computed dew point |
| Audit trail for disputes | file versions and hope | partial | ✓ full pedigree per value |
| Remote sites with poor links | — | gaps in history | ✓ 7-day buffer, auto-reconcile |
| Freedom to change calc engine | — | — | ✓ per point, side by side |
| Open data access | it's a file | proprietary export | ✓ standard SQL, Grafana-ready |
Validation — engine vs engine
Two engines. The same gas. See for yourself.
We didn't just claim AME's engine is right — we ran it side by side with GasVLe 5.15, the industry's reference for decades, on the same compositions and pressures. Because AME Portal can host both, this isn't a slide — you can reproduce it on your own gas, any day.
On the 10 wet-gas cases the reference could solve cleanly, AME agreed to within seventeen thousandths of a kelvin. On the 2 hardest — natural gas at 60 bar with a trace of water — the reference failed or reported the wrong phase, and AME solved both.
ISO 18453 water dew point · 12 comparison cases · GasVLe 5.15 vs AME engine · full record on request
How closely AME tracks the reference engine
Difference in computed water dew-point temperature (AME minus GasVLe 5.15), same composition, same pressure — in millikelvin, thousandths of a degree.
The gap is mostly under 3 mK and never more than 17 mK. Drawn against the ±2 K tolerance that governs a gas contract, the worst case is a sliver one pixel wide.
Where it really counts: a trace of water at pressure
Natural gas at 60 bar, 0 °C, 102 ppm water. On cooling, the first liquid to appear is water. Miss it and you deliver wet gas believing it is dry — hydrate risk, corrosion, a broken contract.
And the gas-quality figures? On the standard, to the digit.
Calorific value, Wobbe index and relative density to ISO 6976:2016 — AME lands exactly on the standard's own reference example, while matching GasVLe's long-established numbers to within a hundredth of a percent.
| ISO 6976 Annex D example (15/15 °C) | ISO 6976:2016 | GasVLe 5.15 | AME engine |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gross calorific value — volume, real (MJ/m³) | 39.73351 | 39.7361 | 39.73351 |
| Wobbe index — gross, real (MJ/m³) | 50.30318 | 50.30375 | 50.30318 |
| Relative density, real | 0.62391 | 0.623978 | 0.623911 |
The numbers are indistinguishable. The engineering is not. AME's engine is modern .NET / C#, full double precision, Linux and Windows. GasVLe is a 2009 Fortran core behind a VB6 add-in — single precision, Windows-only, licence-locked ActiveX. Where the two ever diverge, it is usually GasVLe's single-precision arithmetic you are seeing, not the physics.
Who it's for
Where gas quality is money.
-
Transmission & storage
Custody transfer points, border stations and storage facilities that live or die by contractual dew point limits.
-
Gas treatment
Dehydration and processing plants that need to see performance drift before it becomes an off-spec event.
-
Industrial consumers
Power, LNG and process plants protecting turbines and equipment from liquid carry-over and quality excursions.