A Smart Combined Wireless Sensor Network for Vibration and AE Signals Measurement

Mechanical and insulation defects can lead to severe faults in power equipment, making it essential to conduct a comprehensive and accurate fusion diagnosis. Vibration and acoustic emission (AE) are two effective ways to detect the above two defects. This article proposes and develops a reliable smart vibration and AE combined wireless sensor network (WSN), featuring both low cost and power consumption, which is suitable to detect and monitor the power equipment’s mechanical and insulation conditions. First, the combined sensor is designed and the feasibility is validated by simulation, then the circuit system is designed in order to sample and process analog signals, perform edge computing, self-calibrate impedance, and transmit wireless data. The calibration and consumption tests are carried out to verify the combined measurement performance and reliable smart sensing. Then, a combined vibration and AE WSN is designed and established, enabling efficient sensor control. Fixed and mobile clients are proposed to support monitoring for various applications. Additionally, laboratory experiments demonstrate the sensor’s ability to synchronously measure vibration and partial discharge (PD), a novel vibration-AE amplitude (VAA) graph is presented to reflect the correlation between vibration and PD. The proposed WSN has been deployed in an actual gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) substation, it is able to detect an apparent abnormal vibration on phase-B of the voltage transformer chamber due to a poor electrical contact defect. This article presents a reliable and effective wireless sensing approach for the distributed fusion detection and diagnosis of both mechanical and insulation conditions of power equipment, offering a feasible solution for industrial automated measurement.