Development of high synchronous acquisition accuracy wireless sensor network for machine vibration monitoring

•A machine vibration monitoring system based on wireless sensor networks is proposed.•A wireless sensor node with dual processor architecture is designed.•A solution for synchronization acquisition based on cross-layer design is adopted.•The proposed node could acquire machine vibration at the sampling rate of 20 kHz.•The mean of the synchronous triggering errors is reduced to 87.85 ns.

Vibration-based condition monitoring is an important approach to ensure the reliability of industrial machines. On the one hand, traditional wired monitoring systems exhibit certain limitations in specific cases. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), on the other hand, have excellent potential to avoid these constraints. However, there are still some problems that remained to be solved, such as high sampling rate and synchronous acquisition. In the present study, a machine vibration monitoring system based on WSNs has been developed and presented. Firstly, a wireless sensor node with dual-processor architecture is designed to balance cost, power consumption and performance. Then, in order to improve the accuracy of synchronous acquisition, a novel solution based on hardware cross-layer design is adopted. Lastly, experiments of the proposed node are performed and the effectiveness of the proposed machine vibration monitoring system is validated. The results show that the mean value of synchronous triggering error is reduced to 87.85 ns.