Compressive-Sensing-Based Reflectometer for Sparse-Fault Detection in Elevator Belts

Abstract

This article presents a design approach to the early detection of elevator-belt failures. The proposed system is based on the time-domain reflectometer (TDR) techniques with the objective to detect the presence and location of faults along the cables. The proposed detection circuit, which measures the cable impedance variations, presents the spatial location of the fault as the main technical challenge due to the requirement of very high time-resolution. In order to reduce the electronics costs of each individual node installed in a monitoring distributed system, this article proposes to improve the location capabilities by implementing a compressive-sensing (CS)-based receiver. Using CS allows us to reduce the number of samples to be sent to a central processor to implement the recovery process of the time-domain sparse signal and still using a low-cost data-acquisition system connected to each monitored elevator.