A Wireless Sensor Network For Monitoring The Temperature Of Roots Blowers In Cement Plant

In the cement industry one of the most important problems is maintaining the reliability of the cement kiln for its continuous operation. Roots blower equipments widely used in cement industry are distributed in the sides of the kiln in the range of dozens of meters to hundreds of meters and the number can reach more than 10.The Roots blowers in the kiln head are responsible for providing high pressure air to blow coal powder into the cement kiln. In the running process of Roots blower, for some reason the temperature of Roots blower is higher than normal. At this time, cooling should be deployed to guarantee the normal operating condition of Roots blowers for fear of unnecessary loss for Roots blower faults. Therefore, it is necessary to implement on-line temperature monitoring of the Roots blower to avoid unexpected faults.Compared to wired sensor placement industrial wireless sensor networks are cheaper, more convenient to install and maintain, which are suitable for wide applications. So it is necessary to explore a wireless sensor network for monitoring the temperature of Roots blowers and provide effective means to fault prediction of Roots blowers.The main work of this paper are as follows:1.Low power consumption is considered as the most critical performance of the node.Low power consumption electric components are deployed as many as possible for sensor nodes, routers and coordinators.2.Sensor nodes are mounted on the monitoring points. Temperature sampling and wireless communication program are writed into the microcontroller of sensor nodes. And measured data are sent to Xbee module on sensor node by serial interface of microcontroller.Then the data are sent to coordinator through routers or to coordinator directly according to the transmission distance to the laptop. The data processing and control program running on the laptop achieve network parameter settings, temperature data display and alarm function.3. CRC errors occur after a long sequence of samples could be handled by retransmission. And burst glitch errors could be solved by a new digital filter algorithm to eliminate burst glitches for trade-off between reliability and energy consumption.4.Necessary reconfiguration is implemented for requirement of the framework including adjusting the sampling period, setting the temperature alarm trigger level, transmission power and channel frequency to optimize the network's efficiency and operation.After 3 days working the test data proves that the nodes are reliable. Having calculated the working time according to power consumption of the nodes, the system can work continuously for 3 months or longer without replacing the batteries and meet the temperature monitoring of Roots blowers basically.