Design of wireless sensors for intelligent manufacture monitoring

Abstract

Continuous monitoring of manufacturing machinery can allow industrial firms to replace worn parts before they fail, thus preventing production line downtime, but such monitoring requires the development of precise and cost-effective sensing system. This paper demonstrates a wireless sensing system composed of a temperature sensor module and a Wi-Fi transceiver module to monitor the status of ball screws used in industrial machinery. The sensing unit is constructed from a very small (~1 cm3) SMD-type glass PT-1000, while the Wi-Fi module is integrated into with a microcontroller on a printed circuit board smaller than 5 cm2. An experimental setup is implemented on a single-axis ball screw stage using three temperature sensors embedded at different positions. Temperature data are successfully measured and transmitted to a central computer, verifying the feasibility of this proposed system.