Ortiz Uriarte, Luis E.

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    Wireless mesh network for manufacturing floor monitoring
    (2012-05) Ortiz Uriarte, Luis E.; Jia, Yi; College of Engineering; Quintero, Pedro; Valentín, Ricky; Department of Mechanical Engineering; Quiñones, Carlos
    As the demand for higher quality and decrease in production costs and maintenance downtime increases, Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) has become an attractive practice in the manufacturing industry, which in turn calls for the monitoring of machinery to predict the time to failure. Furthermore, as micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology has advanced in recent decades, the cost of designing and building sensor nodes greatly, making it less expensive than ever to embed data acquisition infrastructure into manufacturing equipment. Wireless Sensor Networks is one such technology that has benefited from these advances and now stands as a viable solution to manufacturing equipment monitoring due to its adaptability and ease of installation. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network tailored to a manufacturing floor environment. The implemented network uses Zigbee Standard compliant radios to fully realize a mesh multi-hop multi-point to point network topology. Sensor nodes were designed using commercially available components. For the processing unit, an Atmel Atmega 328p microcontroller with the Arduino bootloader was used. For the radio unit, the Zigbee compliant Xbee Series 2 radio was used. Power was supplied using Lithium-ion Polymer batteries. The parameters observed using the Wireless Sensor Network were temperature and humidity on an injection molding machine, as well as a solder rework oven., as well as product tracking via counting using an infrared range sensor. Finally, a node measuring equipment vibration was used as a diagnostic tool. The designed Wireless Sensor Network was deployed at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, Manufacturing Laboratory on the Mechanical Engineering building. Using a three node setup. A second deployment was performed using four nodes at the Industrial Engineering Manufacturing line. In both deployments the base station nodes were a laptop computer running a data acquisition program written to parse and save the incoming sensor data. The work and results presented in this thesis show that Wireless Sensor Network technology can be integrated seamlessly into a manufacturing environment without severe interruptions of work and a relatively low cost. These sensor nodes operated for a given amount of time without failure and a packet loss of 0% due to the robustness of the Zigbee Standard. No extra infrastructure was needed to embed the sensor nodes, representing an attractive option for equipment monitoring in the manufacturing industry.