Evaluation of Wireless Acquisition of Vibration Data Over Bluetooth in Harsh Environments
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Evaluation of wireless acquisition of vibration data over Bluetooth in harsh environments William Eriksson Computer Science and Engineering, master's level 2018 Luleå University of Technology Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering Evaluation of wireless acquisition of vibration data over Bluetooth in harsh environments William Eriksson Lule˚aUniversity of Technology Dept. of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering Div. of Computer Science May, 2018 ABSTRACT Bluetooth is a standard for short-range communication and is already used in a wide range of applications. Transferring vibration data in industrial environments for performing machine health monitoring is an application that Bluetooth potentially is suitable for. In this thesis the energy requirements and the performance of a system featuring an accelerometer and a flash memory device in conjunction with a microcontroller with Bluetooth Low Energy capabilities is evaluated. Literature, the Bluetooth Low Energy specification, and datasheets of the selected hardware are reviewed in order to theoretically estimate the expected energy consump- tion according to selected user scenarios. The energy consumption is then evaluated in practical tests on real hardware. The performance of Bluetooth Low Energy is evaluated by testing throughput and received signal strength in different environments including industrial environments. The results show that the evaluated hardware can be operated with low energy con- sumption. The required energy for the most demanding of the selected user scenarios which involves actively using the hardware for about 8 hours requires 1.1 ·10−2 Wh. In- cluding potential losses of a voltage regulator, a Li-ion battery with a capacity of only roughly 5.5 mAh can supply the system for the whole user scenario. The results also show that Bluetooth can operate with a reasonable throughput in environments where many other devices are communicating on the same frequency band as Bluetooth. By choosing a connection interval that is between 25 ms to 100 ms the Bluetooth link becomes robust while still maintaining a high throughput. The equipment could communicate over a dis- tance of up to 148 meters with a throughput between 177 kbps and 72 kbps, depending on the configurations. The results show that the Bluetooth communication performed better in the industrial environments in which the system was evaluated in compared to the also evaluated office environments. The reason for this outcome is likely that there were fewer interfering devices in the industrial environments compared to in the office environments. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first of all like to thank everyone at Rubico Consulting AB for giving me the opportunity to make my master's thesis in your field of work and aimed at one of yours products and also for providing me with an office and all equipment I needed in my thesis work. Within Rubico I would like to especially thank my supervisors Patrik P¨a¨aj¨arvi and Anders Larsson for putting a lot of time and effort into providing valuable guidance and input. I would also like to thank my supervisor Ulf Bodin at Lule˚aUniversity of Technology for providing helpful material and documents for me to review and for, along with Patrik and Anders, guiding me through my thesis work. Finally I would like to thank Ulf Ohlund¨ and Stefan Lundqvist at Smurfit Kappa Pite˚afor arranging access to the kraftliner mill for conducting tests in industrial envi- ronments. William Eriksson v CONTENTS Chapter 1 { Introduction 5 1.1 Background . .5 1.2 Motivation . .6 1.3 Problem definition . .6 1.3.1 Research questions . .7 1.4 Delimitations . .7 1.5 Thesis structure . .7 Chapter 2 { Related work 9 2.1 BLE energy consumption . .9 2.2 Wireless communication in industrial environments . .9 Chapter 3 { Method 11 3.1 Research process . 12 Chapter 4 { Theory 13 4.1 Bluetooth . 13 4.1.1 BLE architecture . 13 4.1.2 BLE topologies . 18 4.1.3 BLE air interface protocol . 21 4.1.4 Synchronization over BLE . 21 4.2 Hardware and software specifications . 22 4.2.1 System on a chip . 22 4.2.2 BLE stack . 25 4.2.3 Accelerometer . 25 4.2.4 Flash memory device . 25 4.3 Measurement modes, procedures and scenarios . 26 4.3.1 Measurement modes . 26 4.3.2 User scenarios . 30 4.4 Energy consumption . 32 4.5 Radio phenomena . 34 4.5.1 Path loss . 34 4.5.2 Interference . 34 4.5.3 Multipath propagation . 35 4.6 Batteries . 35 4.6.1 Primary batteries . 35 4.6.2 Secondary batteries . 36 Chapter 5 { Theoretical calculations 37 5.1 Energy consumption estimations . 37 5.1.1 Energy estimation of the high mode procedure . 38 5.1.2 Energy estimation of the normal mode procedure . 41 5.1.3 Energy estimation of the low mode procedure . 44 5.1.4 Energy estimation of the user scenarios . 46 Chapter 6 { Implementation and evaluation 49 6.1 Evaluation hardware . 49 6.1.1 BLE development kit . 49 6.1.2 Accelerometer evaluation board . 49 6.1.3 Flash memory device evaluation board . 49 6.1.4 Energy analysis tool . 49 6.1.5 Battery . 50 6.1.6 Voltage regulator . 50 6.2 Throughput, RSS and range . 50 6.2.1 Office corridor . 50 6.2.2 Dining hall . 51 6.2.3 Industrial environments . 52 6.2.4 Outdoors . 52 6.2.5 Comparison . 55 6.2.6 Transmission power . 57 6.2.7 Connection intervals . 58 6.3 Energy consumption . 63 6.3.1 Current measurement preparations . 63 6.3.2 Measurement results . 63 6.3.3 Battery test . 75 6.3.4 Required battery capacity . 76 Chapter 7 { Discussion 79 7.1 BLE Connection types . 79 7.2 Energy consumption . 80 7.3 Synchronization over BLE . 80 7.4 BLE Range . 81 viii 7.5 Batteries . 81 7.6 BLE in industrial environments . 82 Chapter 8 { Conclusions 83 ix Abbreviations & Acronyms ADC ......... Analog-to-digital converter ATT .......... Attribute protocol BLE .......... Bluetooth Low Energy BR/EDR .... Basic Rate / Enhanced Data Rate CRC .......... Cyclic redundancy check DC ........... Direct current DMA ......... Direct memory access EMI .......... Electromagnetic interference FHSS ......... Frequency hopping spread spectrum FIFO ......... First-in-first-out FTSP ......... Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol GAP ......... Generic access profile GATT ........ Generic attribute profile GPIO ........ General purpose input/output HCI .......... Host controller interface HFXO ........ High frequency oscillator IC ............ Integrated circuit IFS ........... Inter Frame Space ISM .......... Industrial, Scientific, and Medical IP code ...... International Protection Marking LDO .......... Low-dropout (regulator) LOS .......... Line-of-sight LPCOMP .... Low power comparator L2CAP ....... Logical link controller and adaptation protocol 1 MCU ......... Microcontroller unit MD ........... More Data MEMS ....... Microelectromechanical system MHM ........ Machinery health monitoring MIC .......... Message Integrity Check MTU ......... Maximum transmission unit NFC .......... Near field communication ODR ......... Output data rate PCB .......... Printed circuit board PDU ......... Protocol data unit PHY ......... Physical (layer) PPI ........... Programmable Peripheral Interconnect RAM ......... Random access memory RMS ......... Root mean square RSS .......... Received signal strength RSSI ......... Received Signal Strength Indicator RTC .......... Real-time counter RX ........... Receive SB ............ Solder bridge SIG ........... Special Interest Group SIR ........... Signal-to-interference ratio SM ........... Security manager SNR .......... Signal-to-noise ratio SoC ........... System on a chip SPI ........... Serial Peripheral Interface 2 SPIM ......... Serial Peripheral Interface Master SMD ......... Surface-mount device TX ........... Transmit UUID ........ Universally Unique Identifier UWB ......... Ultra-wideband WFE ......... Wait for event WFI .......... Wait for interrupt 3 CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1.1 Background Bluetooth is a global standard for short-range communications and is included in almost every single mobile phone, laptop, and tablet on the market. There are two major modes of operation in the Bluetooth standard, the Bluetooth Basic Rate / Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) mode and the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mode. BLE is, as the name suggests, mainly aimed at applications where long battery life is important [1]. BLE is already used in a wide range of applications and machine health monitoring (MHM) is an application that BLE potentially also can be suitable for. Both machine failures and machine maintenance can be expensive. If machines are left unmaintained until they break it may result in costly reparations and production down time, if on the other hand machines are maintained in a preventive purpose more often than necessary it might also result in high costs. MHM is thus a procedure where the health of a machine is diagnosed mainly in order to be able to perform predictive maintenance, i.e. only perform maintenance when it is needed but before the machine fails. There are several methods for performing MHM, measuring motor current, analyzing lubricants, ultrasound testing, and vibration analysis are a few examples where vibration analysis is the most common method [2]. Rubico Consulting AB1, referred to as only Rubico from now on, is a consulting company specialized in embedded systems and signal processing that also offer in-house developed products to customers. One of the products that Rubico offer is a tool for performing MHM by vibration analysis to classify the health of rolling bearings, motor shafts, gears, and other machine components. The tool consists of two devices, a sensor device and a hand-held central device. The sensor device includes a microcontroller and an accelerometer. The central device is and looks similar to a mobile phone but in a rugged format in order to endure harsh industrial environments. The two devices are connected by a cable and the data is streamed to the central device during a 1www.rubico.com 5 6 Introduction measurement. 1.2 Motivation Rubico's vibration analysis tools are frequently used in harsh industrial environments that pose a major strain on the cable connectors and the cable itself. Physical strain, corrosive chemicals, dust, and dirt are some of the challenging attributes of these environ- ments.