FPGA based multiple-channel vibration analyzer for industrial applications with reconfigurable post-processing capabilities for automatic failure detection on machinery

Abstract

Machine monitoring is one of the major concerns in modern industry in order to guarantee the overall efficiency during the production process. Several monitoring techniques for machinery failure detection have been developed, being vibration analysis one of the most important techniques. The typical equipment used for vibration analysis is a general purpose single channel spectrum analyzer that most of the cases is not well suited for the specific task and lacks from the capability of simultaneous multiple channel analysis and it is not specifically designed for vibration analysis. The contribution of this work is to present the development of a low-cost FPGA based 3-axis simultaneous vibration analyzer for embedded machinery monitoring with the novelty of a post-processing stage that can be designed and implemented into the same FPGA for automatic on-line detection of specific machinery failures thanks to its reconfigurability. The vibration analyzer has three stages: vibration monitoring with a MEMS accelerometer as sensor, three parallel 1024-point FFT cores and one post-processor for the analysis of the specific vibration related failure, which can be reconfigured to attend the specific task. One of the most important failures in induction motors is the broken bar condition and the developed vibration analyzer was tested to detect this condition on several motors for different failure severities, giving good detection results. Other vibration analysis can be performed by the three channel FFT cores with the reconfiguration of the post-processing unit to detect or enhance a specific characteristic under study