Development of a smart acceleration measurement unit for industry 4.0

One of the main issues taken into account concerns the reduction of power consumption. In particular, also the 'standby' condition must be accounted and it represents a significant amount of the total power dissipation. Systems using a wake-up strategy transmit the data only when the measurand exceeds a specific threshold level. This operation strategy also named 'Zero-Current Standby' has been pursued in this paper. In particular, we present a smart acceleration measurement unit, based on a piezoelectric transducer which is capable to monitor sinusoidal vibrations (50 Hz) coming from vibrating devices, such as electrical machine, industrial equipment, instrumentations, etc.). The proposed smart acceleration measurement unit provides the power required by the electronic conditioning circuit and the Bluetooth transmitter only when the level of acceleration overcomes a fixed threshold. This threshold can be adjusted to corresponding values to a malfunction of the vibrating device. The activity of the device can be monitored within an IoT approach using a specially developed APP. Laboratory characterization and experimental results are also presented. They show a linear characteristic, which makes the proposed system suitable for many applications.