A smart sensing system to analyze piping vibrations in industrial installations

An important issue that deserves a special attention in almost all industrial installations is related with piping vibrations. This paper presents a measurement system that includes several measuring nodes to acquire vibration data from a set of locations of an industrial piping system. Each measuring node includes basically a tri-axial accelerometer, a vibration sensor, a temperature sensor, a microcontroller and a ZigBee wireless communication unit. Concerning the software component of the measurement system, a particular attention was dedicated to measurement accuracy and errors´ compensation caused by influence variables. Artificial neural networks, namely Kohonen maps, are proposed to classify vibration patterns associated with the data collected from the distributed measurement network. A flow meter test bench was used to perform static and dynamic tests and to evaluate measurement system performance.