Design and implementation of a wireless sensor network for temperature sensing in hostile environments

Wireless sensor networks are becoming more and more popular thanks to their advantages. Despite compliance to a standard is often preferred, proprietary solutions can offer better performance, since they can be purposely tailored to application requirements. In this work, an innovative and proprietary wireless sensor network for steam sterilizers temperature probes, capable to overcome limitations of currently adopted wired solutions, is developed and experimental tested. Indeed, steam sterilizers are among the most challenging environments to be thermally mapped (temperature varying from −5 to +140 °C with pressure up to 5 bar in presence of humidity-RH 100% condensing). According to the authors' knowledge, the proposed system is the first attempt to use untethered nodes not only for logging temperature data, but also for controlling the steam sterilizers in real-time. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of architectural, hardware and software solutions, offering overall performance comparable with legacy wired systems. In particular, accuracy better than 1 °C has been obtained over the whole operating range, thus widely satisfying requirements imposed by standardization bodies.