A Wireless Multifunctional Monitoring System of Tower Body Running State Based on MEMS Acceleration Sensor

Linxi Dong, Haonan Wang, Gaofeng Wang, Weimin Qiu
Hangzhou Dianzi University


Abstract

This paper proposes a design of wireless monitoring system of tower body running state (such as the tilt angle, temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc.).The system adopts the structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques to monitor the state of tower, and can be applied to the power transmission tower and communications tower. Although, the SHM has been widely applied to civil engineering and building structures subjected to various loadings, but it is lack of applying to the field of running state monitoring for the transmission and communication tower. This study proposes a monitoring system which can be applied to the tower body running state monitoring and the system adopts the SHM techniques. Micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS)-based acceleration sensor used in this study employs a method for calculating the tilt based on the difference between the static acceleration and the acceleration due to gravity, and the design proposed in this study is based mainly on MEMS acceleration sensor. The wireless system uses wireless sensor nodes to transmit the data which is about tower running state to the monitoring server. And wireless sensor node system consists of a short—distance wireless transmission network (Zigbee 2.4GHz) and a remote telecommunication network (Global System for Mobile communication--GSM). In this way, the study has resolved the important problem about the communication distance limitation. The performance of the monitoring system has evaluated through several experiments under the condition of laboratory in different aspects of the contrast. Such as, comparing the angel obtained by protractor with the measuring angle which is monitored by the monitoring system, to evaluate the accuracy of the calculation, and subsequently comparing the measurement results transmitted to the server by both wired and wireless communication to verify the reliability of the wireless transfer method. The experiment results (wired and wireless transfer system, angle obtained by protractor and the measuring angle, etc.) indicate the wireless monitoring system can monitor the tower body running state real-timely and accurately. Thus, according to the experiments which are tested in laboratory, the wireless monitoring system proposed in this study can monitor the running state of tower.