High-performance Zynq FPGA-based wireless sensor node for vibration monitoring systems

Vibration-based condition monitoring of rotating machinery is considered as the most effective strategies of early fault detection and maintenance. Wired solutions in the traditional vibration analyses and surveillance systems suffer considerably from several disadvantage such as low mobility and high cost of installation and maintenance. The technological progresses led in the last decades in the fields of microelectronics, micromechanics and wireless technologies have brought a new generation of ad hoc networks called wireless sensor networks (WSN) that presents significant challenges and offers economic practical solutions. The use of the WSN in the vibration analysers is useful to monitor and analyse the vibration of rotating machinery as well as early fault detection. However, the vibration analyser WSN based must meet several requirements such as high-performance processing capabilities with a high sampling rate and low power consumption. System-on-chip (SoC) designs based on FPGA circuit is an attractive approach to increase performance and decrease costs during industrial equipment monitoring process. In the present work, we designed and implemented a high-performance wireless node for vibration analysing based on Xilinx Zynq FPGA platform. The proposed node collects a tri-axes vibration data and performs FFT computations of maximum 16384 points. FFT results are then transferred to the base station through an Xbee module. The experimental results showed that the node achieves the requirements of high-sampling rate up to 50 kHz, where the relative error between the computed frequency by the FFT of the node and the real frequency of the generated signal can be reduced to less than 0.1%.