Design Of Long-Distance Wireless Sensor Nodes For Offshore Wind Turbine Vibration Monitoring System

Offshore wind power is one of the world’s fastest growing new energy. China is rich in offshore wind resources, and the electricity market is very huge in coastal areas. With the development of equipment manufacturing industry, China’s offshore wind power is growing rapidly. But labor and maintenance cost25%to30%of the electricity price, so remote condition monitoring become a good choice. By designing a kind of long-distance wireless network node for offshore wind turbine vibration monitoring system, it can provide a convenient way for data collecting and status monitoring, to greatly reduce the operation and maintenance costs. It is important to the safe operation of offshore wind turbines.This thesis analyzes the communication environment at sea, design a front-end power amplifier module of the RF chip CC2420(including a Balun matching circuit, power amplifier modules, a RF antenna) to increase communication distance, with consideration of the microprocessor modules, memory modules, power modules and interface module for a completed design of the long-distance sensor network nodes. A printed circuit board (PCB) is designed with Cadence Capture and Layout tool, and fabricated with all the circuit component assembled. The firmware for the board is also designed and debugged, and field tests are conducted. Test Results show that the design is reliable when the communication distance between a transmitting node and a receiving node is up to2.2km which indicates that the designed wireless sensor node meet the design requirements.