Development on Gas Leak Detection and Location System Based on Wireless Sensor Networks
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Abstract
Develops a gas leak detection and location system
for the production safety in Petrochemical Industry. The
system is based on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN); it can
collect the data of monitoring sites wirelessly and sent to the
computer to update values in the location software.
Consequently, it can give a real-time detective of the
potential risk area, collect the data of a leak accident and
locate the leakage point. However the former systems can
not react in time, even can not obtain data from an accident
and locate accurately [1]. The paper has three parts, first,
gives the overall system design, and then provides the
approaches on both hardware and software to achieve it.
INTRODUCTION
With the continuing growth of the forces of social
production and the gradual awakening of the people’s
consciousness of the importance of production safety, a
series of measures have been put forth to ensure worker’s
safety. In high-risk industries such as chemical, electricity
and cement industries, small negligence may cause heavy
economic losses and serious environmental pollution.
Therefore, many large companies, including PetroChina
and Sinopec, are pumping large amounts of funds to
upgrade existing equipment in order to remove the hidden
danger. However, there are still some shortcomings on
real-time monitoring and on data transmission and accurate
location of a leakage point when an accident happens.
Mainly because: most of the current equipments are based
on wired networks, it is backward in technology and hard
to be deployed; the technology of data acquisition in
accidents is also backward and so it is hard to locate the
leakage point [2]. These problems can be solved with the
help of WSN. WSN has absolute superiority on data
acquisition and transmission.
STRUCTURE OF THE SYSTEM
The gas leak detection and location system consists of
three parts: control center, coordinator and terminal nodes.
There are two kinds of terminal nodes: full-function device
(FFD) and reduced-function device (RFD). The
supervising software on the control center is based on TI’s
Z-Location Engine, it displays the location and the status
messages of all the monitoring sites, and it is a graphical
description of the geographical information of the entire
potential risk area. The coordinator is also a gateway; it
acquires all the information from FFD and RFD, and then
transmits to the control center to update the nodes’ status
messages on the supervising software. Besides, it
broadcasts instructions from control center. FFD is a router,
it s a node that links groups together and provides
multi-hoping for messages.
Software design
ZigBee WSN has three kinds of nodes: the coordinator,
the router (or FFD) and the end device (or RFD). There is
no marked qualitative differences between them on
hardware design. The main difference is on
communication software design.
As the gateway of the ZigBee WSN, coordinator
automatically initiates the formation of the network. After
that, it will wait on until all the nodes nearby finished
joining in the net [5]. Then the coordinator will sent
instructions or collect information such as the connection
status, sensor data and location data, and then sent them to
the control center to update value in the location software.
All these processes are completed in a specified number of
regularly timed execution cycles. The flow chart of
coordinator is shown in Fig. 8.
CONCLUSIONS
A new gas leak detection and location system was
developed; it compromises sensitive sensors and ZigBee
WSN which is smart, low-cost, low-power and
low-maintenance. In two modes, this system can monitor
the gas leakage sensitively, get the data from a scene of the
accident and locate the leakage point. Based on WSN, the
system is easy to be deployed and overcomes the
shortcomings on current systems. It is used to improve the
rescue quality and shorten the time for rescue. Therefore it
can compensate for the weaknesses of current systems.