Design of a New Stress Wave-Based Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) Communication System with Piezoceramic Transducers.

Aiping Wu,Yali Ren,Sihong He,Siu Ho,Gangbing Song,Ning Wang

doi:10.3390/s19030558

Abstract

Stress wave-based communication has great potential for succeeding in subsea environments where many conventional methods would otherwise face excessive difficulty, and it can benefit logging well by using the drill string as a conduit for stress wave propagation. To achieve stress wave communication, a new stress wave-based pulse position modulation (PPM) communication system is designed and implemented to transmit data through pipeline structures with the help of piezoceramic transducers. This system consists of both hardware and software components. The hardware is composed of a piezoceramic transducer that can generate powerful stress waves travelling along a pipeline, upon touching, and a PPM signal generator that drives the piezoceramic transducer. Once the transducer is in contact with a pipeline surface, the generator integrated with an amplifier is utilized to excite the piezoceramic transducer with a voltage signal that is modulated to encode the information. The resulting vibrations of the transducer generates stress waves that propagate throughout the pipeline. Meanwhile, piezoceramic sensors mounted on the pipeline convert the stress waves to electric signals and the signal can be demodulated. In order to enable the encoding and decoding of information in the stress wave, a PPM-based communication protocol was integrated into the software system. A verification experiment demonstrates the functionality of the developed system for stress wave communication using piezoceramic transducers and the result shows that the data transmission speed of this new communication system can reach 67 bits per second (bps).

Highlights

Stress wave communication has emerged as a form of wireless communication through solid materials, including metal, rocks, concrete, and among others [1,2,3]
The motivation for developing such a piezoceramic transducer is for future robotics applications and motivation for developing such a piezoceramic transducer is for future robotics applications and the the actuator design can be incorporated on the hand of a robot to enable stress wave communication actuator design can be incorporated on the hand of a robot to enable stress wave communication upon “touch.” The developed tranducer consists of eight piezoceramic arc segments assembled in upon “touch.” The developed tranducer consists of eight piezoceramic arc segments assembled in parallel to increase vibration amplitude
We verify the feasibility of the stress wave communication system, including both the hardware and the software

Summary

Introduction

Stress wave communication has emerged as a form of wireless communication through solid materials, including metal, rocks, concrete, and among others [1,2,3]. With the increasing need for reliable communication for special applications, such as within concrete structures, well drilling string, metal structures, etc., an increasing number of research works have reported on investigating and applying stress wave communication in many different fields [4,5,6,7]. Piezoceramic material, with its unique sensing and actuating capacity [8,9,10], high bandwidth [11,12,13,14], low cost, and wide availability in different shapes and sizes, can be used to build transducers to generate and detect stress waves for a variety of purposes [15,16,17,18], including stress wave-based communication [19] and energy harvesting [20]. Stress wave communication is mainly applied among three types of structures, including concrete structures, metal walls, and pipeline structures

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion