SIRIUS Project

Contract no.329E/01.11.2013 for co-financial support of Romanian partners in EUREKA-EUROSTARS projects participation

Financed by UEFISCDI – INNOVATION Programme  – European Cooperation Subprogramme Eureka – Eurostars

Wireless Sensing System for High-Performance Industrial Monitoring and Control

Project Outline:

Industrial plant assets are increasingly being perceived as “Working Capital” of an organization. Therefore vibration monitoring continues to assume strategic significance within a large range of industries, from manufacturing to automotive and aerospace. The increasing demand on reducing  operating costs lead to the conclusion that asset condition monitoring can actually be a medium to long-term cost saving investment rather than an operating expense. Consequently, the condition monitoring market is forecast to reach US$2.1 billion by the year 2015. Monitoring vibration, however, is only one aspect of the problem. The other aspect has to do with controlling it, in order to reduce the wear and tear. The control aspect also has a very large market. According to the EC report on the monitoring and control market by 2020, Europe has captured roughly 1/3 of the global market, on par with the USA and Asia, to the amount of 62B€ in 2007. Even in spite of the current economic crisis, the Monitoring and Control sector is expected to continue to grow at 7% per year at a much higher rate than the overall economy, thus pointing towards a figure of 143B€ in 2020.

Current solutions for vibration/condition monitoring, however, lack several important qualities needed to meet the stringent requirements of today’s industries in terms of certain qualitative and quantitative metrics, such as flexibility, reliability, performance, energy efficiency and cost. One of the main bottlenecks is represented by the  exorbitant installation and maintenance cost due to the laying of cables, which themselves are prone to wear and tear. Cables can also impose inconvenient restrictions on the design of monitoring and control systems, in terms of design flexibility, weight and bulk. Thus the use of cables also automatically limits the extent to which monitoring and control can be carried out, as the number of points of measuring and control is limited.

Wireless systems represent an appealing solution to these problems. By leveraging the cabling costs and allowing simple, plug-and-play deployment, wireless sensors have theoretically a huge market opportunity in the industrial monitoring and control arena. However, the market traction is still slow. There is still skepticism about the performance and reliability of wireless sensors, as opposed to their classical, wired counterparts. Wireless sensors are still seen through the “Smart Dust” vision: small, cheap, even disposable, unreliable, but many.

We argue that a high-performance, versatile and robust wireless sensing system is needed in order to make a leap forward from the “Smart Dust” vision and come closer to the expectations and requirements of the industrial arena. This is precisely the main objective of the SIRIUS project: to research and develop a high-performance, versatile wireless system with self-powered capabilities, used for data acquisition, process monitoring and control, with applications in industrial vibration monitoring, condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. An embedded / deep-embedded solution for wireless monitoring and control will be provided, following the idea of distributed intelligence, which now penetrates into modern production lines and technological plants.

Such a high-performance system with high-speed accurate sensing, on-board data processing, high-throughput, low-delay, and real-time wireless communication is the ideal candidate for a large number of industrial applications. Such a system can support sustainable maintenance and advanced monitoring and control, and thus contribute to increased safety, optimized energy consumption, improved risk-based analysis and even reduced environmental pollution in a large range of industries.

This system will be a flexible and affordable solution for production SMEs, which is a unique market opportunity.

The SIRIUS project will cover the necessary R&D activities for delivering the above mentioned system, from specifications and design, to platform development, algorithms and protocols development and finally testing and validation (see also the SIRIUS Concept Diagram in the Annex).

Project’s expected results

The main result of the project will be the integrated system (hardware and software) comprising:

• the sensing platform with on-board signal-processing hardware and wireless communication capabilities;
• the embedded software (firmware);
• the wireless networking protocol stack software;
• the data processing API;
• the advanced control algorithm software;
• the web-oriented, flexible visualization tools.

STATUS REPORT: Phase I

Phase I – Prototype implementation for wireless platform

Deadline : 30/11/2014

Results:This first phase of the project was focused on the following activities:

1.  Meeting of all project partners (April 2014): Inertia Technology, REX Controls, PROSYS PC, was held in ENSCHEDE – THE NETHERLANDS  and had the following objectives:

• Presentation of  partner’s expertise areas
• Demonstration of wireless platform (INE, PRO)
• Demonstration of control system (REX)
• Requirements analysis and specifications
• Dissemination (website, EURODYN 2014)

2.  EURODYN 2014 participation in 30.06.2014 – 03.07.2014

• Inertia Technology and PROSYS PC exhibited and demonstrated the SIRIUS technology and concept

3. Meeting of all project partners (October 2014): Inertia Technology, REX Controls, PROSYS PC, was held in Plzeň – CZECH REPUBLIC and had the following objectives:

• Demonstrating the current state and developments –   wireless platform and control system driver
• Definition of SIRIUS use case(s) – update
• Analyzing the requirements and specifications outlined in the document: “SIRIUS-D2.1. requirements and specifications.pdf”
• Management issues:  Tasks and deliverables – plan update
• Business plan
• Conclusions and next steps, discussion

4. Prototype implementation platform.

• Scientific and technical report “SIRIUS-D3.1. Initial platform prototype” giving a brief overview of the developed prototype (hardware and software)

STATUS REPORT: Phase II

Phase II – Final version implementation for wireless platform

Deadline : 30/11/2015

Results:The second phase of the project was focused on the following activities:

1.  Meeting of all project partners (May 2015): Inertia Technology, REX Controls, PROSYS PC, was held in ENSCHEDE – THE NETHERLANDS. The third meeting focused on the SIRIUS business cases, in order to finalize the mid-term exploitation plan and reach milestone MS3.

Additional points discussed during the third meeting were:

• Results of initial tests with the SIRIUS platform
• Further platform development and adaptations
• Dissemination plans
• Planning of next steps

2.  EURODYN 2014 participation in 30.06.2014 – 03.07.2014

• Inertia Technology and PROSYS PC exhibited and demonstrated the SIRIUS technology and concept

3. Meeting of all project partners (October 2015): Inertia Technology, REX Controls, PROSYS PC, was held in Plzeň – CZECH REPUBLIC and had the following objectives:

• Business cases
  • Control use-case
• Monitoring use-case
• Final system design
  • Hardware
  • Wireless protocols
  • Control algorithms
  • Visualization
• Integration and testing of new gateway
• Plans for integrated test setup
• Management
  • Tasks and deliverables
  • Next meetings, exhibitions
  • Website update
• Conclusions and wrap up

4. Implementing the final version of the platform and software interface