Autonomous Distributed Plant Monitoring System (ADPMS)

The demand for operational uptime on key equipment in a plant environment drives the requirement for increased monitoring capability to minimize the risk of unplanned maintenance needs. Often, this requires the addition of sensors at different locations on the equipment to provide additional data. Standard industrial sensors can be applied to provide additional data for later analysis but are expensive to install and are difficult to reconfigure based on changing monitoring needs; a system reliant on traditional sensors is not easily expandable because of installation costs. Wireless sensors which utilize batteries require maintenance of their own (battery replacement) which becomes prohibitive on a large scale. Often, the physical phenomenon measured to provide an indication of health can also be converted into energy. Impact-RLW Systems proposes the design and demonstration system concept that uses self powered wireless sensors coupled with interfaces to legacy systems to present maintenance, operational, and CBM data via an organized web based utility. BENEFIT: The system described here utilizes several components of the overall Impact-RLW Systems product family which includes complex data analysis platforms (S2NAP®), self-contained complex data sensors (e.g., Sentire™), and simple sensors for low-bandwidth sensors in installations that require decade-long unattended life. We believe that there are many applications outside the target described in the topic description both government and commercial. The self powered wireless sensing platform that will be further developed under this effort has applications in any monitoring scenario that requires a fast installation of an analysis tool or is in a stressing environment. In the DoD, this could be in any Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) facility or in some cases onboard aircraft themselves. The technology proposed here is flexible and expandable to any size facility requiring unattended monitoring solutions. The development of this proposed system will serve as a valuable model on which to base system design at other facilities – both DoD and commercial. Benefits of the system are a simple, low installation cost monitoring system that can be applied on any machine of interest anywhere in the plant. The system accommodates interfaces to in-place IT systems and does not rely on different monitoring systems from different OEMs for unique equipments. The monitoring infrastructure directly supports implementation of prognostics algorithms and prognostics based maintenance planning applications. The system pioneers energy scavenging as a power source for wireless sensors transmitting complex data over low power wireless networks.