Design of a Wireless Temperature Acquisition System for Laser Cutting Process

This paper presents the development of a wireless temperature acquisition system for the laser cutting processing of an advanced engineering material. The wireless system effectively automates the temperature monitoring activities. The system is comprised of hardware, software, and a personal computer (PC). The wireless system module architecture consists of a power subsystem, a sensor subsystem, and a main node system mainly based on wireless radio frequency (RF) technology. The advantages of this system are management of data, response to temperature alert, ease, and accuracy of required documentation. The workability of the developed integrated wireless sensor was tested at the Manufacturing Laboratory, School of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia. The collected data were used to evaluate the system workability. Data shows that the system can measure and monitor the temperature in the time and distance ranges. This work is a significant start towards temperature monitoring using wireless system networks (WSN) for laser cutting process monitoring. Index Term—Temperature monitoring, wireless sensor, laser cutting, process monitoring