WSN application in the harsh industrial environment of the oil sands

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of a unique WSN platform specifically researched to monitor the health conditions of the vibration screens used by Oil Sand operators in Canada. Previous to WSN, wired sensing solutions have been attempted for this project, but failed to sustain integrity in the harsh conditions imposed by the environment. The researched platform allowed, for the first time, to monitor the thickness of the screen ligaments by providing real-time thickness measurements of the mesh screen. The architecture design of the platform was made modular and scalable to easily adopt the sensor platform for other industrial facilities making it flexible across other applications. A complete system was realized at Queen's University TRLab and successfully presented to the Oil Sand operator on a miniature working lab model.

Toward Integrated Large-Scale Environmental Monitoring Using WSN/UAV/Crowdsensing: A Review of Applications, Signal Processing, and Future Perspectives

“…Such systems should guarantee that some pivotal parameters (e.g., level of radiation, percentage of chemical and biological pollutants) are within the tolerated ranges and, whenever possible, prevent the illegal dumping of solid/liquid waste in the environment. As an enabling technology of the emerging Industry 4.0 paradigm, WSNs have been employed to monitor nuclear storage facilities [91,92], the disposal of chemical materials and waste [93], and, more generally, harsh industrial environments [94,95]. A common challenge faced in all these scenarios is represented by the extreme environmental conditions in which the WSNs are deployed.…”

Monitoring operational mining equipment using Sprouts Wireless Sensor Network platform

“…Upon reception of the echoed ultrasound signal from the CMP, the MSP430 MCU records the second time response t1 in order to calculate the time difference of arrival (TDOA), ∆t=t 1 -t 0 . Knowing the velocity of ultrasound in steel υ=5769m/s, we can measure the thickness T of the shovel tooth at any given time during operation using equation (1).…”

“…INTRODUCTION Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are popular for their wide scope of application domains ranging from agricultural, medical, defense, industrial, social, mining, etc., which share a mostly outdoor environment space that is unregulated and unpredictable, thus, potentially hostile, or physically harsh, for WSNs [1]. The popularity of WSNs stems from their fundamental concept of being low cost and ultra-low power wireless devices that can monitor and report sensor readings with little user intervention.…”

A new opportunistic routing scheme in low duty-cycle WSNs for monitoring infrequent events

“…Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have attracted worldwide attention over the last few years and have led to a wide variety of applications that can cope with harsh operating conditions [1]. WSNs enable communication between several small devices, called sensor nodes, generally deployed in an inaccessible target area, where an infrastructure-based network would be complex, if not impossible.…”