Condition monitoring with LoRaWAN: Preliminary tests on gas turbine exciters

Condition monitoring of huge mechanical plants has recently encountered a broad attention due to several possible implications linked to reliability, availability and system safety. Indeed, it is nowadays crucial to provide electromechanical systems to the market with the outmost and highest confidence degrees not only in terms of performance but also in terms of endurance capabilities. Additionally, together with conventional measurement and sensing systems, novel wireless technologies have been deployed in the operating field providing new challenges and opportunities. If on one hand it is possible to get signals which were not available before, on the other hand, a question on the new transmission systems reliability has arisen. This unresolved clue is moreover stressed by the fact that such systems are often exploited in heavy duty balance of plants and in harsh environments. Such conditions require a deep analysis of the sensing and transmission systems in order to let the signal gathered be highly trustable: as an example the Gas Turbine activation scenario is presented. Under these assumptions, in this paper the authors provide an analysis about the possibility to exploit LoRaWAN transmission system in a gas turbine exciter. The challenge is to investigate how the exciter sparking, as well as the transmission system, performances are affected by environmental operating conditions.