Vibration Signal Acquisition

and Processing System Design in the Oil

Field Water-Injection Station Pump

Changyi Xie, Qianbing Wu, Haixia Wu and Guoyue Liu

Abstract According to the working condition and the common fault causes of the
water-injection pump, this paper introduces a data acquisition and signal processing
circuit of the oil field water-injection station pump vibration detection system. In terms
of hardware, the scheme design consists of data acquisition module based on the
three-axis acceleration sensor ADXL345 and microprocessor STM32F030, data pro-
cessing and transmit module based on the 433 MHz wireless transparent data trans-
ceiver module YL-100IL and microprocessor STM32F407, and the PC module for the
analysis and display of the vibration signal for the pump. For the processing and analysis
of the vibration signal, the acquired acceleration signal is processed using the Empirical
Mode Decomposition method to reduce noises, after which the frequency spectrum of
the vibration signal can be obtained. Due to the fact that different faults of the pump can
produce different characteristic frequencies, the frequency spectrum gained from using
Empirical Mode Decomposition can be used to the analysis of the water-injection pump
fault diagnosis. Finally, field tests prove that the circuit in the system works stably and
meets the design requirements. It is able to achieve the function of vibration signal
acquisition, processing, and diagnosis of the working condition.

Keywords Water-injection pump ⋅ Vibration signal process ⋅ Empirical Mode

Decomposition (EMD)

1 Introduction

In the oil industry, water injection is an operation where water is injected into the
field, usually increasing the pressure and stimulating the production. The imple-
mentation of water injection in the development of new reservoirs is an increasingly

C. Xie (✉) ⋅ Q. Wu ⋅ H. Wu ⋅ G. Liu

School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
e-mail: changyixie@163.com
H. Wu
e-mail: wuhaixia@bit.edu.cn

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 1255

S. Patnaik and V. Jain (eds.), Recent Developments in Intelligent Computing,
Communication and Devices, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 752,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8944-2_147
1256 C. Xie et al.

popular process all over the world. This is especially true in oil production, where
water injection is used both to improve oil recovery and to maintain pressure by
placing short or long horizontal water-injection wells around the reservoir flanks of
the reservoirs. Therefore, oil field water-injection operation is one the important oil
recovery processes. Most injection system consists of a centrifugal pump and
related electrical components. Only when the pump works properly can the oil
recovery process work safely and efficiently. So it is of great importance to monitor
the pump working condition. This paper introduces a real-time pump working
condition detection system based on the vibration signal analysis.

2 The Hardware Design of the System

Within this paper, the overall design of the water-injection pump working condition
detection system can acquire the pump vibration signals, get the characteristics of
the vibration signals using some methods which will be discussed below, and then
recognize whether the pump works normally or not. The overall design of the
system can be seen in Fig. 1.
As shown in Fig. 1, the system consists of three modules, which are data
acquisition module, data processing and transmit module, and the upper PC
module. Among the modules above, the data acquisition module takes the charge of
the acquisition of each test point’s vibration signals; data processing and transmit
module does the job of processing and analysis of the vibration signals which are
obtained from the data acquisition module through the RS485 interface; the upper
PC module gets the vibration signals data packages using the wireless 433 MHz
interface and displays the corresponding results on the screen [1].

2.1 Data Acquisition Module

The water-injection pump’s vibration signals contain the fault information on its
own. Considering the expensive price of the vibration signal acquisition system on
the market, it is very necessary to design a cheap and practical vibration signal

Data acquisition module Data processing and transmit module

Upper PC

Vibration
signal RS485 RS485 RS485 WIRELESS 433MHz
ADXL345 STM32F030 STM32F407
INTERFACE INTERFACE 433MHz

Fig. 1 Overall design of the system

 Vibration Signal Acquisition and Processing System Design … 1257

Fig. 2 Design of data acquisition module

acquisition system. According to the requirement for accuracy of the

water-injection pump’s vibration signals, the data acquisition module can be
designed as shown in Fig. 2.
The acquisition process of the pump’s vibration signals can be described as
follows: Firstly, the three-axis accelerometer ADXL345 measures the vibration
signals controlled by the microcontroller STM32F030 via SPI interface, and then
the vibration signals are transmitted to the data processing and transmit module
through the RS485 module [2].
As we can see from Fig. 2, there are two parts within the data acquisition
module: the vibration signal data acquisition part and the RS485 communication
part.
(1) The data acquisition part

The data acquisition part is designed mainly based on the digital accelerometer
ADXL345 and MCU STM32F030. The ADXL345 is a high resolution (13-bit)
three-axis accelerometer, and it has a small and thin package; it can work using the
supply of ultralow power; it can communicate with other ICs using the SPI digital
interface. According to the features of the ADXL345 introduced above, using the
ADXL345 can make the vibration signal data acquisition module work as a
low-cost, low-area, and low-power application. The characteristics of ADXL345
above make it suitable for the water-injection pump’s vibration signal acquisition.
(2) The RS485 communication part

The data acquisition module communicates with the data processing and transmit
module through the RS485 interface. RS485 is a serial transmission standard which
uses differential signals to transmit data. Due to the use of differential signaling, the
RS485 interface is immune to noise and the maximum data transmission speed
(100 Kbps) and distance up to 1200 m are supported. The RS485 interface is
designed based on the RS485 transceiver SP485 which is a +3.3 V low-power
half-duplex transceiver that meets the specifications of the RS485 serial protocol up
to 10 Mbps under load [3].
1258 C. Xie et al.

Fig. 3 Design of data processing and transmit module

2.2 Data Processing and Transmit Module

The data processing and transmit module collects the vibration signal data from the
data acquisition module and then packages the data collected within a period of
time, after which the data packages are transmitted to the upper PC module for
EMD analysis. The data processing and transmit module is designed as shown in
Fig. 3.
The RS485 interface is designed based on the RS485 transceiver SP485 as
described above. The MCU STM32F407 decides whether the data acquisition
module starts the data acquisition operation or not according to the instructions
received from the upper PC module through the wireless 433 MHz communication
interface. Considering the long distance between data processing and transmit
module and the upper PC module, the wireless method is taken for the commu-
nication. The 433 MHz is widely used in RF modules. Usually, the use of fre-
quencies is strictly restricted by authorities in each country, but the 433 MHz ISM
band is free to use in many countries including China. Compared to the expensive
Wi-fi and Bluetooth which requires established connection, the 433 MHz wireless
RF module is cheaper and more practical to transfer UART data. The 433 MHz
wireless interface firstly receives the data from the MCU STM32F407 and then
sends the data to the RS485 UART wireless transceiver YL100-IL [4].

2.3 Upper PC Module

The upper PC module aims to process the vibration signal data collected above to
get the signal frequency spectrum for the fault diagnosis analysis with the method
of EMD. The upper PC module is designed as shown in Fig. 4.
Similarly, firstly the data is received through the 433 MHz interface as above,
and then the data is sent to the upper PC through the USB to MCU UART interface
based on FT232R for later EMD analysis [5].
Vibration Signal Acquisition and Processing System Design … 1259

Fig. 4 Design of the upper PC module

3 Analysis of Signal Based on Empirical Mode

Decomposition

According to Huang [6–8], the conventional Fourier-based approaches may yield

distorted, indirect, or incomplete information about nonlinear and non-stationary
time series, such as pump vibration signal. To reveal useful information from
signals that might be either hidden or distorted by conventional methods, the
Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method was proposed to decompose the
initial multi-component signal into the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), which are
stationary. And it is the EMD method that this paper uses for the analysis of the
vibration signal [9].

3.1 The Basic Principle of Empirical Mode Decomposition

EMD is a method of processing a signal with keeping the information of the time
domain. With the method of EMD, the original signal is decomposed into IMFs
which are mono-component and stationary. And with all the IMFs, the original
signal can be described not distortedly.
As an IMF, it has to meet the following two requirements:
1. The number of extrema must be the same as the number of zero-crossings or
differ by one at most.
2. At any moment, the upper envelope composed of local maxima and the lower
envelope composed of local minima has a mean value of zero.
The sifting process can be used to describe the process of decomposing the
signal into IMFs as follows [10]:
1. Firstly, according to all the maxima and minima of the original signal xðtÞ, with
the method of cubic spline interpolation, the upper envelope emax ðnÞ and the
1260 C. Xie et al.

lower envelope emin ðnÞ can be obtained. And the mean value of the emax ðnÞ and
emin ðnÞ is m11 ðtÞ.
2. Calculate the value h11 ðtÞ = xðtÞ − m11 ðtÞ.
3. Judge whether the value h11 ðtÞ is an IMF or not, i.e., whether the value h11 ðtÞ
meets the two requirements above an IMF. If the value h11 ðtÞ is an IMF, the first
IMF c1 ðtÞ is obtained, c1 ðtÞ = h11 ðtÞ. Otherwise, h11 ðtÞ is treated as the new
“original signal,” and it will be processed again with the steps 1–3.
4. Calculate the value xðtÞ = xðtÞ − ci ðnÞ, and judge whether the value xðtÞ is a
monotonic function. If not, steps 1–4 will be repeated one more time. Otherwise,
the decomposition process will be stopped, and the value xðtÞ is treated as the
residual.
After the process of EMD, the original signal xðtÞ can be described as follows
with the IMFs and the residual:
n
xðtÞ = ∑ cj + rn ð1Þ
j=1

The original signal can be recovered with all the IMFs and the residual. And the
different IMFs contain different frequency components, respectively, showing the
detailed characteristics of the signal frequency, which can be used for the fault
diagnosis of the pump. The EMD processing method of the vibration signal is
called from the MATLAB function which can be used in the upper PC.

3.2 Simulation Examples

A vibration signal xðtÞ is generated by a vibration testing table, and the vibration
signal is acquired and processed with the modules above. The analytical expression
for the signal is xðtÞ = sinð200πtÞ + sinð120πtÞ. The sampling frequency is con-
figured as 1000 Hz, and the sampling time is 2 s. The vibration signals are acquired
and processed with the EMD method. After Hilbert spectrum analysis of IMFs, the
final processing results are displayed as shown in Fig. 5.
As shown in Fig. 5, Fig. 5a is the original signal; Fig. 5b is the frequency
spectrum of the original signal; Fig. 5c, d is the two main IMFs after the EMD
process; Fig. 5e is the frequency spectrum of the IMF1; and Fig. 5f is the frequency
spectrum of the IMF2. As we can see, the two main IMFs are IMF1 and IMF2, and
they are correspondent with the two frequency components of the original signal.
Vibration Signal Acquisition and Processing System Design … 1261

Fig. 5 Analysis result

4 Conclusion

The water-injection station pump vibration signal acquisition and processing system
which is designed in this paper can realize the acquiring and the analyzing of the
vibration signal. The system acquires the signal data using the accelerometer
ADXL345, and then the signal data is packaged and transmitted to the upper PC via
433 MHz wireless RF module for EMD analysis, and according to the EMD results,
different characteristic frequencies can be obtained for further fault diagnosis which
can be introduced to the water-injection station for the safe and efficient production.

Acknowledgements Thanks to my teacher Haixia Wu who enabled me to research on this issue

and helped me a lot for completing this project. Thanks to Qianbin Wu who worked with me
together for the research. Also, thanks to Guoyue Liu who helped me a lot in completing the paper.
Last but not least, I would like to say thank you to all concerned persons who cooperated with me
in this regard.

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