Maximilian Huwyler completes his Master's thesis on distributed acoustic-vibration monitoring

Maximilian Huwyler completed his Master’s thesis at UZH (co-supervised with Burkhard Stiller of the Communication Systems Group (CSG)): a five-node wireless acoustic-vibration testbed for industrial predictive maintenance, showing that detection and localization may need different modalities within the same system. Congratulations, Max!

Frequent switching between generation and pumping puts hydropower turbines under significant mechanical stress, and unplanned failures are costly, while strong background noise complicates purely acoustic monitoring. The testbed pairs a microphone and an inertial sensor on each of five wireless nodes around a small-scale pumped-storage water loop to compare audio, vibration, and multimodal detection.