2012 IEEE Business, Engineering & Industrial Applications Colloquium (BEIAC)

Wireless Sensor Network For Laser Cutting Process Application

H. Edin, M. Q. Omar, M. Mokhtar, O. Sidek, M. A. Miskam School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering School of Mechanical Engineering Collaborative Microelectronic Design Excellence Centre Engineering Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 14300 Nibong Tebal, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia
Abstract-The application of wireless sensor network for process monitoring of laser cutting process is a promising solution to address the problems in achieving good cutting performance. Wireless sensor network provide real time data monitoring flexibility, maintenance convenient, and easy to relocation for laser cutting process application. This paper presents the development of wireless sensor network for monitoring temperature at cutting surfaces during laser cutting process. The system consists of thermocouple sensors, microcontroller programmable system on chip platform, wireless radio frequency and software data logger. The workability and performance of the system was tested by using gas cutting. Keywords-Temperature monitoring, wireless sensor network, laser cutting, process monitoring

II. INTRODUCTION

At present, various applications used wireless sensor network (WSN) for tools in order to get the information needed from the environment. WSN commonly consist of sensor nodes, receiver node, network topology, and data acquisition. Many applications were adopting WSN such as for environment monitoring, industry, agriculture, structure health monitoring and others. In environment monitoring, biologist study about the animal habitat and environment. This is due to their advantages such as real time data monitoring, no wiring, quick installation, maintenance convenient, flexibility, detect or localize information, simple to deploy, and low powered network system [1-5]. Real time data monitoring are very important to analyze the behavior of animals and the conditions of the environments. The implementation of WSN in agriculture can help farmers to monitor their crops environment and produce a quality of the crops. WSN can be used to monitor the condition of machine that is commonly used in the industry. Continuously monitoring with real time can reduce cost of maintenance, optimize the performance machine and give earlier fault detection. Structure health monitoring concept was to monitor the conditions of building, bridge, damn aerospace ship and others [6-9]. There are many applications used WSN but implementation of the technology at the laser cutting process industry is quite new. Laser cutting of advanced engineering metals has advantages in term of noncontact process, high precision

capability, high quality surface finish (narrow kerf width, straight cut edges, low roughness of cut surfaces, and minimum metallurgical and surface distortions), and easy integration with computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines for cutting complex profiles. Variation of advanced engineering materials such as tungsten, ceramic, aluminum alloys, inconel tantalum, and metal matrix composite were studied by adapting the laser cutting technology [11-13]. In order to perform best cutting performance there are parameters needed to optimize such as laser power, cutting speed, frequency, duty cycle, focal length, standoff distance, assist gas pressure, beam nozzle, and cutting lenses. This parameter need to monitor during the laser cutting process. Traditionally, wired communication was adapted to monitor the parameters. The wired communication brings many difficulties such as high cost for maintenance, inflexible of installation, and inconvenient to relocation. Applying WSN were the effective solutions towards the problems occurs that using the wired communication. Currently, traditional temperature data logger required sensor and data logger to be attach together in order to collect data [14]. The temperature data logger also complicated in nature and not high accuracy. These makes wired temperature data logger was not a practical approach for on field test without power supply. In this work, a wireless based temperature data logger has been developed to overcome the difficulties of wired temperature data logger. Preliminary work showed that wireless temperature acquisition system was successfully tested for laser cutting process [10]. The development of WSN is extension of the developed system. This paper presents the development and testing of WSN for monitoring of laser cutting process.
II. OVERVIEW OF THE SYSTEM

Figure 1 shows the overview of the system. Sensor nodes will be attached at work piece surfaces. Thermocouple will sense the temperature and transmitted wirelessly to the receiver and computer log the data. This WSN system applies a star topology where five sensor nodes will transmit the data into one receiver. Figure 2 shows the sensor nodes. Hardware architecture of the system The system consists of two main parts: sensor nodes and receiver. Sensor node contains a thermocouple A.

978-1-4673-0426-9/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

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sensor, sensor signal conditioning, microcontroller, and transceiver module while receiver only contains a transceiver module and computer. Type K thermocouple was used because it can measure a wide range of temperature (up to 1250 C).

Fig. 3. AD595 completed system B. Software architecture of the system The software architecture of the system can be divided in two parts: microcontroller and receiver. In the microcontroller there are two parts needed to configure; first the user modules and the coding program in C language that functions to process the output voltage from the thermocouple. The configurations of user modules setting depend on what applications needed. Four main user modules describe previously which were PGA, ADC, UART and LCD. Each of the user modules has their own parameters that need to be set. All the user modules must be started or initialize at the beginning of the coding program. In order to provide the temperature information, the output voltage from the thermocouple was converted from analog signal into digital signal. In the microcontroller, 12 bit ADC was used to process the digital signal. The digital signals are being process by a mathematical formula to provide the value of temperature measurements. Then, all the information of the temperature are being display through LCD and transmit through a UART module in order to integrate with RF module. The structure of the programming in microcontroller can be described with the flowchart (figure 4).

Fig. 1. Overview of the WSN for laser cutting process

Fig. 2. Five sensor nodes Sensor signal conditioning is used to convert the small output signal in milivolt from the thermocouple sensor into 0 5v linear output voltage that can be read by microcontroller. AD595 was used to amplify the output signal that coming from the thermocouple. By using equation (1), AD595 output can be calculated. Output voltage from the AD595 should produce 10mv / oC. The input of AD595 which were pin 1 and pin 14 are connected with the thermocouple that build from the combination of iron (Chromel) and constantan (Alumel) as shown in figure 3. The minimum voltage for the AD595 is 5v. The detail about schematic diagram and PCB board design explained in preliminary work. [10]. AD595 output = (type K Voltage + 11V) x 247.3 (1) Fig 4. Flowchart of the sensor node software implementation The second part of the software architecture is how the data or temperature information receives by the receiver that attached to the computer system. In the system, five sensor nodes transmit the information wirelessly to the receiver. Each of the sensor nodes has their own id to identify each of the five sensor nodes. All the information receives by the receiver can be monitor by the user using data logger software. This software has capability to monitor and logged the information in a text files. The receiver is attached with the computer by using a serial port or RS232 com port. The users can know what time were data taken and value of the temperature that were transmitted from the five sensor nodes. The data logger software can run using Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Window Seven.

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All the information saved or logged in the text files can be analyzed and organized with other software tool such as Microsoft Excel. The data logger software can include serial data transfer at 9600 bps. The structure of the software for the receiver can be describe as flowchart as shown in figure 5.

IV. RESULT AND DISCUSSION

Figure 8 shows the results of the testing when 5 sensor nodes were placed at the metal plate. From the graph, the maximum temperature for sensor node 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were 232C, 240C, 230C, 220C and 220C respectively. The temperature increase when the gas cutter reach at thermocouple location and start to decrease until it back to the room temperature.

Fig. 5. Flow chart of the receiver software implementation

III. EXPERIMENTAL METHODS

In the testing, gas cutting process was used to simulate the laser cutting process environment due to limitation assessment of the machine at industry. The experiment was conducted in a laboratory at the School of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia and handled by skilled technician. Figure 6 shows the technician execute the gas cutting process. The tools were gas cutter, metal plate, metal holder, five sensor nodes and receiver. The sensor node was placed near the metal plate with the thermocouple sensor attached on the metal plate.

Fig. 8. Temperature versus time for 5 nodes sensor 3 metal plates with thickness 15mm, 10mm and 5mm had been used to measure the maximum temperature reading at different thickness. Since all sensor nodes produce a stable temperature reading, thus this experiment only performs at node 1. The obtain results recorded in Figure 9. Obviously, the metal plate with thickness 15mm will record a maximum temperature reading compare to 10mm and 5mm thickness. Fig. 6. Gas cutting process The metal holder locked the thermocouple sensor with the metal plate to ensure the thermocouple did not move while the cutting process in progress (Figure 7). The receiver was placed at about 100m from the gas cutter.

Fig. 9. Temperature versus time for different metal thickness

V. CONCLUSION

Fig. 7. Sensor node placed near the metal plate

In this paper, we present the development of wireless sensor network for laser cutting process. The hardware

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development for five sensor nodes with one receiver were designed and presented. Thermocouple sensor with microcontroller PSoC platform and wireless module were integrated for monitoring temperature profile during laser cutting process. The software development for each sensor nodes with receiver for data logger was also been created. The wireless sensor network was work based on star topology network. Experimental simulation test results for laser cutting process by using gas cutting process was proved the workability and performance of the system. Therefore the future work will focus on onsite implementation and testing of the system at laser cutter machine.

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Laser Cutting Process, International Journal of Electrical & Computer Sciences, Vol. 10,No. 6. Yilbas B.S., Karatas C., Uslan, I., Keles, O.,Usta, Y., Yilbas, Z., Ahsan, M., "Wedge cutting of mild steel by CO2 laser and cut-quality assessment in relation to normal cutting," Opticsand Lasers in Engineering, vol. 46, pp. 777 784 (2008). Tirumala, R. B., Rakesh Kaul, Pragya Tiwari, A.K. Nath, "Inert gas cutting of titanium sheet with pulsed mode CO2 laser," Optics and Lasers in Engineering, vol. 43, no. 12, pp. 1330-1348 (2005). Black, I., "Laser cutting speeds for ceramic tile: a theoreticalempirical comparison," Optics &Laser Technology, 30(2): 95-101 (1998). Gikuru M, V.K.Jindal., "Changes in Properties of Coffee Brew Due to Roasting, " World Applied Sciences Journal 2(5) : 527-535,(2007).

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Exploratory Research Grant Scheme (ERGS), Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, 203/PMEKANIK/6730021.

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