Vibration data fusion algorithm of auxiliaries in power plants based on wireless sensor networks

In a power plant, a lot of auxiliaries with high rotating speed are scattered everywhere and the traditional way of online vibration monitoring with shielded cable connections is costly and work expensive. A novel method of vibration monitoring for auxiliaries in power plants based on wireless sensor networks (WSN) has therefore been proposed to realize vibration data acquisition, on-line-detection and data analyzing in this paper, which meets the requirements of auxiliaries with less expenditure and warrants the safe operation in the long run. The multi-sink topological structure of WSN can improve the transmission efficiency of multi-hop network to meet the vibration test requirements of low-latency, high frequency sampling and high data throughput, in which according to the similarity judgments of vibration data, the data whose change is less than the given threshold value will be fused, merged or piggyback transmitted with the largely changing data. Theoretical analysis and simulation show that the above fusion algorithm has decreased the time of sending data, reduced the energy consumption, extended the network lifecycle, and saved the communication bandwidth of WSN.