Abstract:

In future reactors, WSN is going to take a major role in the monitoring and control instrumentation. Diversity and redundancy are the prime requirements of nuclear domain. To provide diversity in the data acquisition method of WSN, instead of using legacy ADCs, an alternate method of digitization can be introduced. This paper proposes a method of digitizing using the concept of Voltage to Frequency Conversion (VFC). But there exists a serious constraint on resources like energy, memory and bandwidth for a deployment based on wireless sensor nodes. Key idea explained in this paper is about the selection of components, which consumes minimum energy, to develop a signal conditioning board that performs signal digitization utilising VFC. This paper also explains the establishment of a typical network that utilizes VFC.


Keywords — Wireless Sensor Network, Voltage to Frequency Conversion, VFC, Signal digitization, Data acquisition;