Network of Smart Tip-Timing Sensors in Distributed Blade Health Monitoring System

Abstract

Blade Health Monitoring (BHM) is often necessary in power plants and in aviation to prevent excessive blade vibration and cracks. This article proposes a network of blade tip timing sensors operated in a distributed BHM system. A number of cooperating agents is implemented in smart conditioning units which can autonomously operate in an adverse environment and communicate with other nodes via a serial interface. The project uses special versions of reduced instruction set chips that are able to operate near the hot section of the engine. Due to the limited number of types of microprocessors available in the extended temperature range grading, it was necessary to fully utilize the limited hardware resources and implement preemptive multitasking. For this purpose, a custom operating system and communication protocol were designed. The protocol hosts the middle layer which hides the implementation of the distributed system. The presented architecture ensures the sufficient computational capacity in individual nodes of the network operated in adverse conditions. It is scalable and resistant to transmission errors.