Feasibility of Low-cost Vibration Monitoring for Ground Vehicles

Abstract

This paper reports empirical investigation for the feasibility of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors, accelerometers and microphones, for prognostic health management(PHM) application in monitoring of ground vehicles on the use case of diesel engine monitoring. The failure mode was injector leakage with four seeded levels of damage. MEMS and piezoelectric accelerometers were mounted in close proximity, following the usual good practices of sensor placement to enable fair comparisons. The process of computing both engineered and data-driven condition indicators was repeated for the data captured by the type of sensors. In addition to the empirical study, the article includes elementary economic analysis to compare the cost of the MEMS-based solution to that of the traditional vibration data acquisition channel. The results suggest that data-driven models seem to be agnostic to the sensor source, but feature engineering may require additional tuning.Also, economic analysis will show that MEMS-based sensing could cheaper than piezo-based sensing for low-cost health and usage monitoring systems(HUMS).