Fault-Tolerant Wireless Communication System for Process Control in Wind Power Stations

摘要

Industrial automation networks (IANs) involve the control system that communicates with the sensors to collect process-related data. To ensure proper control, the control system acts on the physical variables measured by issuing the commands or signals that activate relays, solenoids, motors, and actuators. The implementation of the control system for a wind power station is a time-consuming process. Hence, to speed up the project implementation with reduced cost and maintenance, a fault-tolerant wireless system for wind power stations that employs a wireless protocol, ZigBee is proposed. This wireless protocol can establish a two-way communication between the field devices and the base station. The sensor nodes in IAN may fail due to the energy depletion, hardware failures, etc. Hence, fault tolerance is an important issue to be addressed in IANs. Moreover, the reliability of the IANs is also affected by the sensor node fault. The proposed work aims at designing and developing a low-cost fault-tolerant wireless communication system for the process control of wind power stations.