Vibroacoustic monitoring of complex phenomena with multisensorial measurement network. An application to an electrical power plant

Sound and vibrations problems sometimes require long term monitoring, especially when dealing with complex phenomena. It often happens that annoyance to people or - generally - noise pollution to surrounding environment can be caused by particular conditions of sources which occur somehow randomly. In these cases, in order to understand the causes of problems and solve them, it´s fundamental to perform multi-sensorial measurements on phenomena themselves and on possible causes and trace their behavior for long periods. So as to perform such issues authors have developed a virtual instrumentation-based measurement system which can collect and on-line analyze data from several sound, vibration and other generic channels for months-long periods. In this paper the measurement system will be shortly illustrated and results of a measurement campaign that the Politecnico di Milano carried out in a thermo-electrical power plant in Northern Italy will be presented as an example of application.