Design of a New Stress Wave-Based Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) Communication System with Piezoceramic Transducers

Stress wave-based communication has great potential for succeeding in subsea environments where many conventional methods would otherwise face excessive difficulty, and it can benefit logging well by using the drill string as a conduit for stress wave propagation. To achieve stress wave communication, a new stress wave-based pulse position modulation (PPM) communication system is designed and implemented to transmit data through pipeline structures with the help of piezoceramic transducers. This system consists of both hardware and software components. The hardware is composed of a piezoceramic transducer that can generate powerful stress waves travelling along a pipeline, upon touching, and a PPM signal generator that drives the piezoceramic transducer. Once the transducer is in contact with a pipeline surface, the generator integrated with an amplifier is utilized to excite the piezoceramic transducer with a voltage signal that is modulated to encode the information. The resulting vibrations of the transducer generates stress waves that propagate throughout the pipeline. Meanwhile, piezoceramic sensors mounted on the pipeline convert the stress waves to electric signals and the signal can be demodulated. In order to enable the encoding and decoding of information in the stress wave, a PPM-based communication protocol was integrated into the software system. A verification experiment demonstrates the functionality of the developed system for stress wave communication using piezoceramic transducers and the result shows that the data transmission speed of this new communication system can reach 67 bits per second (bps).