An Energy-Efficient Field-Programmable Gate Array Rapid Implementation of a Structural Health Monitoring System

Abstract

System health monitoring (SHM) of a ball screw laboratory system using an embedded real-time platform based on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology was developed. The ball screw condition assessment algorithms based on machine learning approaches implemented on multiple platforms were compared and evaluated. Studies on electric power consumption during the processing of the proposed structure of a neural network, implementing SHM, were carried out for three hardware platforms: computer, Raspberry Pi 4B, and Kria KV260. It was found that the average electrical power consumed during calculations is the lowest for the Kria platform using the FPGA system. However, the best ratio of the average power consumption to the accuracy of the neural network was obtained for the Raspberry Pi 4B. The concept of an efficient and energy-saving hardware platform that enables monitoring and analysis of the operation of the selected dynamic system was proposed. It allows for easy integration of many software environments (e.g., MATLAB and Python) with the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) platform containing an FPGA and a CPU.