Investigation of Wireless Protocols for Remote Condition Monitoring

Condition monitoring (CM) is an effective strategy to maintain the performances of modern industrial machines. Currently, wired online condition monitoring has been successfully employed in large industrial machines. However, the high cost of these systems have restricted their wide applications, among which, the installation and maintenance cost of the communication cables are one of the major
factors. With the quick development of the wireless and electronics technology, communication cables could be replaced by wireless transmission, which brings several inherent advantages, such as low cost, convenience of installation and easy to replace or upgrade. One key issue of implementing
wireless communications in CM system is the selection of suitable wireless protocols. In this paper, the current popular wireless protocols and their applications in CM are investigated. IEEE802.15.4 is proved to be the most suitable protocol to establish wireless CM systems because of its low power consumption, low cost and its capability of setting up large scale networks. In the meantime, its bandwidth limitation can be overcome by a scheme of embedding more local processing. To evaluate the scheme, a prototype wireless CM system is developed to embed the algorithm of envelope analysis into the node for rolling bearing monitoring. The results show that the amount of data communication over the wireless network can be reduced by 95% while it upholds the performance to monitor the simulated bearing fault in real-time.