A Novel IoT-Based Performance Testing Method and System for Fire Pumps

Fire pumps are the key components of water supply in a firefighting system. At present, there is a lack of fire water pump testing methods that intelligently detect faulty states. Existing testing approaches require manual operation, which leads to low efficiency and accuracy. To solve the issue, this paper presents an automatic and smart testing approach that acquires measurements of the flow, pressure, shaft power and efficiency from smart sensors via an IoT network, so that performance curves are obtained in the testing processes. An IoT platform is developed for data conversion, transmission and storage. The Discrete Fréchet Distance is applied to evaluate the similarities between the acquired performance curves and metric performance curves, to determine the working condition of the fire pump. The weights of the measurement dimensions for distance computation are optimized by the Genetic Algorithm to improve the distinction between normal and faulty performance curves. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed method can completely detect faulty states and prove its high practicality for real firefighting systems.