Vibration Converter with Passive Energy Management for Battery-Less Wireless Sensor Nodes in Predictive Maintenance

Abstract

Predictive maintenance is becoming increasingly important in industry and requires continuous monitoring to prevent failures and anticipate maintenance processes, resulting in reduced downtime. Vibration is often used for failure detection and equipment conditioning as it is well correlated to the machine’s operation and its variation is an indicator of process changes. In this context, we propose a novel energy-autonomous wireless sensor system that is able to measure without the use of batteries and automatically deliver alerts once the machine has an anomaly by the variation in acceleration. For this, we designed a wideband electromagnetic energy harvester and realized passive energy management to supply a wireless sensor node, which does not need an external energy supply. The advantage of the solution is that the designed circuit is able to detect the failure without the use of additional sensors, but by the Analog Digital Converter (ADC) of the Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSN) themselves, which makes it more compact and have lower energy consumption. The electromagnetic converter can harvest the relevant energy levels from weak vibration, with an acceleration of 0.1 g for a frequency bandwidth of 7 Hz. Further, the energy-management circuit enabled fast recharging of the super capacitor on a maximum of 31 s. The designed energy-management circuit consists of a six-stage voltage multiplier circuit connected to a wide-band DC-DC converter, as well as an under-voltage lock-out (UVLO) circuit to connect to the storage device to the WSN. In the failure condition with a frequency of 13 Hz and an acceleration of 0.3 g, the super capacitor recharging time was estimated to be 24 s. The proposed solution was validated by implementing real failure detection scenarios with random acceleration levels and, alternatively, modus. The results show that the WSN can directly measure the harvester’s response and decide about the occurrence of failure based on its characteristic threshold voltage without the use of an additional sensor.

Wireless sensor node powered by piezoelectric vibration energy harvester for vibrational mode identification and structural health monitoring

“…The vibration energy harvester (VEH), which can convert mechanical vibrations from surrounding industrial machinery or structures into electricity, is regarded as a promising power source for WSNs. For example, WSNs powered by piezoelectric or electromagnetic VEHs that can transmit temperature [1] or anomaly [2] data based on their acceleration magnitudes have been reported in the literature. However, although the sparse data provided by these nodes are useful for binary (normal/anomaly) classification, they are insufficient to allow classification of multiple conditions or accurate prediction of conditions based on artificial intelligence (AI) analysis to be achieved.…”

Acceleration-waveform-sending wireless sensor node powered by piezoelectric vibration energy harvester

“…The vibration energy harvester (VEH) is a promising power source for replacement of the cells or batteries. Several practical demonstrations of a WSN powered by a miniature VEH for bearing condition monitoring, 3 temperature monitoring in an industrial environment, 4 and machine failure detection 5 have been reported. Similar to the previous studies, [3][4][5] these WSNs normally transmitted a single data value because it is difficult to transmit time-series (or waveform) data using the 0.1-1 mW power provided by a VEH of several centimeters in size.…”

“…Several practical demonstrations of a WSN powered by a miniature VEH for bearing condition monitoring, 3 temperature monitoring in an industrial environment, 4 and machine failure detection 5 have been reported. Similar to the previous studies, [3][4][5] these WSNs normally transmitted a single data value because it is difficult to transmit time-series (or waveform) data using the 0.1-1 mW power provided by a VEH of several centimeters in size. Recently, Rubes et al 6 developed a WSN powered by an electromagnetic VEH that can transmit waveform data for an ambient vibration.…”