Design and initial validation of a wireless control system based on WSN

Abstract

At present, cantilever structure used widely in civil structures will generate continuous vibration by external force due to their low damping characteristic, which leads to a serious impact on the working performance and service time. Therefore, it is very important to control the vibration of these structures. The active vibration control is the primary means of controlling the vibration with high precision and strong adaptive ability. Nowadays, there are many researches using piezoelectric materials in the structural vibration control. Piezoelectric materials are cheap, reliable and they can provide braking and sensing method harmless to the structure, therefore they have broad usage. They are used for structural vibration control in a lot of civil engineering research currently. In traditional sensor applications, information exchanges with the monitoring center or a computer system through wires. If wireless sensor networks(WSN) technology is used, cabling links is not needed, thus the cost of the whole system is greatly reduced. Based on the above advantages, a wireless control system is designed and validated through preliminary tests. The system consists of a cantilever, PVDF as sensor, signal conditioning circuit(SCM), A/D acquisition board, control arithmetic unit, D/A output board, power amplifier, piezoelectric bimorph as actuator. DSP chip is used as the control arithmetic unit and PD control algorithm is embedded in it. PVDF collects the parameters of vibration, sends them to the SCM after A/D conversion. SCM passes the data to the DSP through wireless technology, and DSP calculates and outputs the control values according to the control algorithm. The output signal is amplified by the power amplifier to drive the piezoelectric bimorph for vibration control. The structural vibration duration reduces to 1/4 of the uncontrolled case, which verifies the feasibility of the system.