Monitoring the reliability of industrial equipment using wireless sensor networks

This paper describes the application use of Sprouts, a modular plug-and-play (PnP) wireless sensor network (WSN) platform architecture, to monitor the reliability conditions of industrial equipment. The platform architecture was specifically designed to be rugged in order to survive harsh industrial environments with features such as versatile metallic packaging and a mount-on-metal patch antenna. The Sprouts platform design incorporates four modular ports using a unique PnP protocol, described in this paper, to identify attached modules. We describe three sensing methods utilized by our modular architecture to monitor the reliability and fault detection of large vibration screens used in the petroleum production process at the Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada. We emphasize our unique nondestructive ultrasound-based solution to monitor the thickness of the two metal compounds, steel and tungsten, composing the vibration screen ligaments.