WSN application in the harsh industrial environment of the oil sands

This paper describes the design and implementation of a unique WSN platform specifically researched to monitor the health conditions of the vibration screens used by Oil Sand operators in Canada. Previous to WSN, wired sensing solutions have been attempted for this project, but failed to sustain integrity in the harsh conditions imposed by the environment. The researched platform allowed, for the first time, to monitor the thickness of the screen ligaments by providing real-time thickness measurements of the mesh screen. The architecture design of the platform was made modular and scalable to easily adopt the sensor platform for other industrial facilities making it flexible across other applications. A complete system was realized at Queen´s University TRLab and successfully presented to the Oil Sand operator on a miniature working lab model.