Design of Embedded Wireless Sensor and its Soft Encapsulation for Embedded Monitoring of Helicopter Planetary Gear Set

Planetary gear set, as an important part of helicopter, is with the characteristics of multi-point and time-varying position engagement. For the revolution of planetary gears round sun gear, directions of vibration and pulse created by tooth damage change continuously. If an accelerometer fixed on the surface of gearbox, the angle between the directions of pulse force and accelerometer sensitivity will change continuously, which will causes that the components of pulse force on the sensitivity direction vary with time and the features of damage are very difficult to extract from the signals. Aiming at this problem, a type of embedded wireless sensor node was designed firstly, which can be fixed on the carrier of planetary gear, and acquires the damage-related vibration signals in a fixed direction of pulse force. Then, to avoid the corrosion of electronic components by the lubrication oil in gearbox, the protect restrictions of the sensor node was investigated and a kind of soft encapsulation method is applied. Finally, real vibration signal is measured and transmitted by the designed and/or encapsulated sensor node. The experiments show that the sensor can measure vibration effectively.