Application of Wireless Sensor Networks on Power Plants Monitoring

The traditional wired monitoring system for power plants is complex and hard to detect when the system faces some problems. The idea of monitoring the environment of power plants wirelessly is proposed to solve this problem. The feasibility of applying wireless sensor networks to power plants monitoring is analyzed. Then a wireless monitoring system based on XBee modules which are using ZigBee technology is designed. The temperature and electrical current data are gathered by sensors attached to the XBee modules and transferred to the PC controller through mesh network. An interface between coordinator and controller is designed utilized LABVIEW software to read data and send commands. In the end, a three nodes demo system is built up to testify the design.