A CONTINUOUS CONDITION MONITORING (CCM) SYSTEM FOR CONVEYOR BELTS BASED ON A DISTRIBUTED OPTICAL FIBRE SENSOR

摘要

A continuous condition monitoring (CCM) system for conveyor belts is disclosed, based on a distributed optical fibre sensor, comprising: a pulse generator section (A) comprising: a laser emitter (6), an electrical pulse generator (7) and an electro-optical modulator (8); an amplification section (B) comprising: an Erbium-doped fibre amplifier (9), together with an ASE noise filter in the EDFA itself, with the aid of a circulator (10) and an FBG fibre (11), where the modulated signal is amplified in order to obtain an appropriate input power of the pump pulses into the sensitive fibre; a testing section (C) comprising: the optical fibre (5) installed on the conveyor belt in order to perform the light backscattering process (4) which may be observed by means of the action of a circulator (12); a light-detection and data-acquisition section (D) comprising: a light photodetector (13) that detects the backscattered light, and a DAQ card (14) for the acquisition of data; and finally, a data-processing section (E) comprising: a computational graphic interface (15) capable of detecting the anomalies corresponding to disturbances generated throughout the spatial distribution of the sensitive fibre, and of emitting preventive alerts to the factory workers, in addition to monitoring the laser emitter (6) via an interface (16); where optical fibre (5) is used as a sensor distributed throughout the length of the conveyor belt.