Sensors in rotating machinery

The ARotor laboratory is a part of AIIC (Aalto Industrial Internet Campus) and part of the research in ARotor are IoT sensors for condition monitoring of a rotating machinery and the related data management. 

Battery powered open source IoT accelerometer have been developed for research purposes, where data is transferred utilizing WiFi. Sensors can be operated with browser based GUI or they can be programmed to work with predefined measurement patterns. IoT accelerometers can be mounted to a bearing housing or other static part of the machine or they can be mounted directly to the rotating part. These wireless battery powered sensors can open opportunities to monitor new and more parts of the machine and get more data from the operation of the machine.

The measurement equipment available at ARotor provides an opportunity for extensive data collection from rotating machinery, Massive data collection from phenomena related to rotors in motion has laid foundation for novel research combining rotors and machine learning methods. 

Recent research at ARotor has focused on building virtual sensors for rotating systems. Virtual sensors can approximate some physical property such as vibration, state space or rotor’s condition based on data from sensors which are not directly measuring the  variable being approximated. Virtual sensors can be based on deep learning, state-space approaches and probabilistic modeling.

The massive data collection is also related to the concept of the digital twin, where virtual sensors predicting key performance indicators would also consider data collected during the design and production phases of a product.