2011 International Conference on Computer Distributed Control and Intelligent Environmental Monitoring

A Data Acquisition System for Methane Drainage Based on ARM and FPGA
Lu Ping , Liang Guangqing , Yu Qing
Chongqing Institute of Coal Science Research Institute, Chongqing, 400039, China
weblp2673@tom.com
frequency which is 200-1000HZ or the current which is 420mA. These sensors include the methane concentration
sensor, the temperature sensor, water level sensor and so on.
The signal transmission way for switch sensor is the current
of 1mA or 5mA. The V-cone differential pressure flowmeter
is used in methane drainage, which carries out signal
transmission through RS485 communication. The gas flow
parameters include the instantaneous mixed flow on standard
conditions, the instantaneous mixed flow on working
conditions, the cumulative mixed flow on standard
conditions, the pipe temperature, the pipe pressure and other
parameters.
Now that methane drainage monitoring systems become
more and more complex, sometimes the coal mines need to
monitor dozens or hundreds of parameters. If only a single
processor is used, it will occupy the CPU for a long
acquisition and processing time, which will reduce the
system's real-time performance. In this paper, ARM extends
the bus via FPGA. As the main controller, ARM realizes the
real-time scheduling for the multi-tasks including the timer,
the sensor data processing, the LCD display, the
communication and external devices controlling . As the coprocessor, FPGA realizes the sensor signal collection and the
interaction with the ARM via the bus. Through this way, the
efficiency of system data acquisition and processing is
improved notably.

AbstractFor the urgent need of methane drainage in coal

mine safety field, a data acquisition system was proposed
which is based on ARM and FPGA. The complex data
collection and data processing were carried out for the
environmental parameters, gas parameters and equipment
parameters. The complex tasks were scheduled effectively
based on embedded operation system; and the multi-channel
acquisition was designed reconfigurable based on large-scale
programmable logic device. The work improves the accuracy
and real-time ability of the gas flow acquisition, and provides a
technical support for methane drainage.
Keywords-ARM;FPGA;methane drainage;reconfiguration

I.
INTRODUCTION
With the practice of methane drainage for power
generation now on the increase, it has become vital to ensure
that effective methane recovery monitoring is in place.
Accurate continuous monitoring is crucial as changes in a
methane drainage system can lead to engine down time and
possibly even damage, reducing revenue and endangering
both plant and personnel[1]. Now many companies have
developed advanced equipments to improve monitoring
quality, which depends on not only the sensors reliability,
positioning, maintenance and calibration, but also the realtime of parameter collection and processing. Core data
acquisition and analysis is an indispensable step in coal
mines in order to broaden the scope of methane[2,3].
As coal mine methane drainage systems have been
widely used, the equipments become more and more
complex with the increasing number of monitoring
parameters such that the real-time acquisition systems are
necessary[4,5]. However, many acquisition systems have no
bus interface and the structures are not easy to expand. For a
single CPU which is used to collect and process, the realtime target is hard to reach[6]. This paper presents a data
acquisition system based on ARM and FPGA technology,
which provides a continuous online and high accuracy
acquisition for the methane drainage monitoring system with
standardization, automation and intelligent features.

III.
SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
The data acquisition system for methane drainage
includes ARM controller with peripheral circuit unit, FPGA
data acquisition unit and the sensor signal processing unit
and so on. The acquisition system are divided into a
motherboard, a backplane and some slave boards which have
external connections. The slave boards locate in the
backplane and can be plugged easily. Such structure make
the system easy to expansion, maintenance and production.
The host controller is LPC2478 microcontroller based on
ARM7TDMIS, which incorporates an LCD controller, a
10/100 Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC), four
UARTs, two Controller Area Network channels, an SPI
interface, three I2C interfaces and other resources. In
addition to 98K on-chip static RAM and 512KB on-chip
FLASH memory of LPC2478, the acquisition system
expands 32MB SDRAM HY57V561620, 2MB FLASH
SST39VF1601 and 8KB EEPROM AT24CL64 to meet the
storage requirements. The coprocessor controller realizing
data acquisition is a low-cost FPGA EP3C5 which is in
ALTERA Cyclone III family.

II.
SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
Manual or remote monitoring systems are used to
determine the effectiveness of the methane drainage system
in coal mine. The monitoring parameters include mixture
flow, flow velocity, methane concentration, suction pressure
and temperature. Barometric pressure should also be
recorded to facilitate the standardization of flow data. The
signal transmission way for most coal mine sensors is the
978-0-7695-4350-5/11 $26.00 2011 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/CDCIEM.2011.451

The system block diagram for data acquisition is shown

in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

and so on. The working process of several modules are listed

below.
1) When the system is powered on, the ARM controller
writes initialization information and control signals through
the ARM Bus Interface to the Configuration Ram. After the
system is running, Automatic Configuration module
transmits various signals to AD Control module, Frequency
Switch Control module and Gas Flow Control module.
2) FPGA controls the AD chip to change the channel
conversion. The 12-bit conversion results are translated into
real value of the sensors through the AD Data Process
module, and the real values are stored in Dual Port RAM
module afterwards.
3) FPGA controls the multiple analog switches, and
collectes the frequency signals or the digital signals of the
comparators. The average frequency obtained after several
measurements is converted into the real value which is
stored in Dual Port RAM module. The three states of
switch sensor are obtained via distinguishing two signals in
the comparators, and are stored in Dual Port RAM module
afterwards.
4) Serial communication IP module within the FPGA is
realized to achieve data communication between FPGA and
V-cone flowmeter regularly. The flow calculation results
through the Gas Flow Process module are stored in Dual
Port RAM.
5) ARM controller regularly reads the results of the
Dual Port RAM via the bus between ARM and FPGA. At
the same time, FPGA outputs the control signals to external
devices.
FPGA acquisition function block diagram is shown in
Figure 2.

System block diagram for data acquisition

A. Multi-channe Signal Preprocessing

In order to achieve the requirements of preventing
explosion and intrinsically safe of coal mine, each data
acquisition channel is isolated by linear optocoupler and all
the input powers are isolated by DC converter modules.
Firstly, all the sensor signals are filtered through the lowpass filter circuit. For the current signal,
the precision
resistance is used to convert the current into voltage. The
current signal of 4-20mA is converted into voltage and is
isolated afterwards. Then the analog signals are converted
into 12-bit digital signals through an AD converter chip with
8-channel.
Since there are more and more different types of sensors
being applied in the coal mines, each sensor signal should be
sent directly to FPGA for parallel processing. Thus the highcapacity and multi-port FPGA with higher price is necessary.
In order to reduce the system cost and meet the real-time
needs at the same time, the grouping parallel acquisition
mode is used in the design. Switch sensors and frequency
sensors are grouped by multiple analog switches. For the
current signal of 1mA or 5mA which is changed into voltage
and is isolated afterwards, the comparator is used to compare
the sensor signal with a fixed voltage. The two signals
obtained from comparison could distinguish the sensor from
three states which may be 1mA, 5mA or broken. The
frequency signals isolated by the optical isolators are directly
sent to FPGA for collection.
B. FPGA Data Collection
The material property and the boundary conditions are as
follows: Gas phase is air, and its density is 1.293 kg/m3,
In the data acquisition system, FPGA is used as the
coprocessor for sensor parameters collection and processing.
The functions of FPGA contain AD control acquisition
module, frequency and switch signals acquisition module,
gas flow collection module, channel configuration module

Figure 2. FPGA acquisition function block diagram.

C. The Coordinated control of ARM and FPGA

The data acquisition system for methane drainage
requires the communication with the central station, realtime process parameters, output alarm signals and control

signals. Multiple tasks are scheduled by the embedded

operating system uC/OS II, which is adopted to a real-time
control system with relatively small number of tasks. It is
high efficient, small storage, open-source and high reliability.

composite stack structure of motherboard and slave boards

make the system easy to maintain, upgrade and large-scale
production.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The paper will appreciate the financial support of Special
Project of the National Department of Science and
Technology (NO. 2008ZX05041-008).

The software of ARM controller is divided into several

parts including FPGA collection results reading, parameters
analysis, LCD display, keyboard, RS485, CAN and Ethernet
communications, interrupt handling of communications and
other tasks. The functions of RS485, CAN, Ethernet
communication can be selected by the PC software to
achieve dynamic task scheduling. Because the devices in the
specific coal mine for methane drainage system are various,
the channel reconfiguration is required. In the design, not
only ARM can be online programmed dynamically through
the PC communication, but also FPGA can be programmed
through ARM IO ports when the system is running.
IV.

REFERENCES
[1]

[2]
[3]

SYSTEM APPLICATION

[4]

The data acquisition system for methane drainage

integrates some functions including parameters collection,
ouput control, data processing, parameters display,
communication and other functions, such that it can meet the
needs of signals collection with various types of sensors.
The high-speed grouping parallel mechanism based on
FPGA realizes channel extension, and increases the
acquisition efficiency. The modular design makes the system
easier to maintain and upgrade. At present, the data
acquisition system, a variety of sensors, the central station
and other devices are connected to work in the methane
monitoring system.
Figure 3 shows the data acquisition system hardware
platform for methane drainage.

Figure 3.

[5]
[6]

Data acquisition system hardware platform

V.
CONCLUSION
The data acquisition system for methane drainage based
on ARM and FPGA can meet the multi-channel, real-time
acquisition and real-time processing requirements. The
3

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