FPGA based multiple-channel vibration analyzer embedded system for industrial applications in automatic failure detection

Machine monitoring is one of the major concerns in modern industry in order to guarantee the overall efficiency during the production process. Several monitoring techniques for machinery failure detection have been developed, being vibration analysis one of the most important techniques. The typical equipment used for vibration analysis is a general purpose single channel spectrum analyzer that most of the cases is not well suited for the specific task and lacks from the capability of simultaneous multiple channel analysis. The contribution of this work is to present the development of a low-cost FPGA based 3-axis simultaneous vibration analyzer for embedded machinery monitoring with the novelty of a post-processing stage that can be designed and implemented into the same FPGA for automatic online detection of specific machinery failures. Two cases of study are presented to show the development performance and capabilities of the system where specific post-processing units are designed. From the results it can be seen that several mechanical failures can be automatically detected by reconfiguring the postprocessing algorithm, embedded in the system.