Condition monitoring in the cloud: Distributed condition monitoring for the improvement of machine availability

Due to the very high demands on availability and efficiency of production systems, conditionbased maintenance is becoming increasingly important. The use of condition monitoring approaches to increase the machine availability and reduce the maintenance costs, as well as to enhance the process quality, has increased over the last years. The installation of industrial sensors for condition monitoring reasons is complex and cost-intensive. Moreover, the condition monitoring systems available on the market are application specific and expensive. The aim of this paper is to present the concept of a wireless sensor network using Micro-Electro- Mechanical System sensors (MEMS) and Raspberry Pi 2 for data acquisition and signal processing and classification. Moreover, its use for condition monitoring applications and the selected and implemented algorithm will be introduced. This concept realized by Fraunhofer IPK, can be used to detect faults in wear-susceptible rotating components in production systems. It can be easily adapted to different specific applications because of decentralized data preprocessing on the sensor nodes and provision of data and services in the cloud. A concrete example for an industrial application of this concept will be represented. This will include the visualization of results which were achieved. Finally, the evaluation and testing of this concept including implemented algorithms on an axis test rig at different operation parameters will be illustrated. © Carl Hanser Verlag, München.