DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT TECHNIQUES FOR ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERSION OF VIBRATION SIGNALS FOR WIRELESS MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to design, analyze and compare four different systems for ADC (analog-to-digital conversion) of vibration signals. Measurement of vibration signals is of particular importance in many areas, such as predictive maintenance or structural health monitoring. Wireless systems for vibration measurements becomes very topical, due to much easier and cheaper installation compared to wired systems. Due to the lack of transmission bandwidth and energy in wireless measurement systems, the amount of digital data being sent has to be reduced; hence, we have to apply ADC systems that can achieve the required digital signal quality, reducing the bit-rate. Four ADC systems are analyzed, for possible application in wireless measurement systems: PCM (pulse code modulation) based on uniform quantization; DPCM (differential PCM) to exploit high correlation of vibration signals; two adaptive ADC systems to cope with significant variations of characteristics of vibration signals in time - APCM (adaptive PCM) with adaptation on variance and ADPCM (adaptive DPCM), with double adaptation (both on variance and correlation). These ADC models are designed and optimized specifically for vibration signals, based on the analysis of 20 vibration signals from a referent database. An experiment is done, applying designed ADC systems for digitalization of vibration signals. APCM, DPCM and ADPCM systems allow significant bit-rate reduction compared to the PCM system, but with the increasing of complexity, hence the compromise between the bit-rate reduction and complexity is needed.