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

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).

Automatic Guided Waves Data Transmission System Using an Oil Industry Multiwire Cable

“…PPM is an efficient modulation technique that has been used by several research groups to transmit digital information via guided waves [23,24,27,47]. In this application, PPM has been applied in the decoding and encoding process to attain data transmission using guided waves through multiwire structures.…”

“…The methods employed for modulation include frequency-shift keying (FSK), amplitude-shift keying (ASK), chirp on-off keying (Chirp-OOK), pulse position modulation (PPM), orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and code-division multiple access (CDMA), among others. Some researchers have used metal pipes [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27], thick metal barriers [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], and plates [37][38][39][40][41][42] as communication channel.…”

Detecting of the Longitudinal Grouting Quality in Prestressed Curved Tendon Duct Using Piezoceramic Transducers

“…In recent years, piezoceramics transducers have been used to monitor structural health [28][29][30]. Piezoceramic transducers have their superiorities of wide frequency range [31][32][33], low cost [34,35], energy harvesting [36][37][38], and the dual functions as a sensor and an actuator. Among various piezoceramic materials, lead zirconate titanate (PZT) has the strongest piezoelectric effect and can be fabricated in different shapes [39,40].…”

Detecting Debonding between Steel Beam and Reinforcing CFRP Plate Using Active Sensing with Removable PZT-Based Transducers

“…As a commonly used piezoceramic material, lead zirconate titanate (PZT) has been applied in structural health monitoring [31][32][33] due to its strong piezoelectric effect [34,35] and wide bandwidth [36,37]. With both sensing and actuation functions, PZTs are often used in active sensing methods for structural health monitoring (SHM) and damage detection.…”