Wireless and battery-operatable IoT platform for cost-effective detection of fouling in industrial equipment

Abstract We present a novel internet of things (IoT) sensing platform that uses helical propagation paths of ultrasonic guided waves (UGWs) for structural health monitoring. This wireless sensor network comprises multiple identical sensor units that communicate with a host PC. The units have dedicated hardware to both generate and receive ultrasonic signals, as well as RF signals for use in triggering the sensors. The system was developed for monitoring and sensing pipelines and similar structures in real-time to facilitate interactive sensing. For accurate sensing with a limited number of arbitrarily scattered sensors, we obtain information from all sensor pairs and analyze helical propagation paths in addition to the commonly used shortest paths. UGWs can propagate long distances along the walls of pipelines, and their propagation velocity depends directly on the thickness of the waveguide, and is affected by energy leakage and mass loading. In this paper, we evaluated the network by utilizing it to detect fouling. The network could be adapted for further ultrasonic measurement tasks, e.g., measuring wall thicknesses or monitoring defects with pulse-echo methods.