Implementation of a new marking system based on piezo-electromagnetic technology : PEM Project

PEM Project "Piezo-Electromagnetic Markers" is an European CRAFT project. Many European companies (research centers, industrials, distributors) participate to this project which leads to develop a new marking system for buried pipes based on piezo-electromagnetic component associated with radio-frequence device. This new system is patented.

CeSigma is in charge of physic and electromagnetic analysis and emitte/receptor device development, in collaboration with other European partners.

In the first time, CeSigma conducted many experiments and studies in order to specify marker's architecture and its embedded electronic (emitted frequency, energy accumulation and restitution by the piezo-electric component, transmitted frequency, ...). Emitter/receptor design and development started after this preliminary specification work.

		Markers integrates piezo-component and electronic device moulded in polymer resin protection. Electronic device provides energy accumulation and restitution by the piezo-electric component in the shape of an electromagnetic wave signal at resonance frequency. In order to track markers, re-emmitted signal is also coded by electronic device.
		Reception antenna is plane and has a 125 kHz to 1 MHz bandwidth.
Emitter/receptor electronic card		Emitter/receptor system is composed by an HF emitter device, an reception antenna and receptor device which provides signal acquisition and numerization, and embedded signal processing. Electronic of the receptor is developed by CeSigma and  has PC104 size format. The electronic card integrates full speed converters (100 MHz 14 bits). In the first prototype, numerical signal is transmitted to a  Pentium processor module by the PC104 bus. Signal processing is done in real-time with Labview software.  The next prototype will integrates a signal processor chip on the card. l

Received signal by the receptor

Signal frequency and energy diagram received from 30 cm buried marker function of two emitted frequency