Tommaso Addabbo, Ada Fort, Marco Mugnaini, Alberto Toccafondi, Valerio Vignoli
Reliability and Safety Considerations Affecting the Design of a Radar Based Railway Crossing Level Passage Monitoring System

Railway crossing passage systems are designed to provide a barrier for unwanted intrusion on the railway tracks. Nevertheless an increase in incidents due to cars or trucks stuck in between the barriers are happening with higher frequency. Therefore the authors in this paper propose and discuss three potential configurations for undesired barrier intrusion detection system design, based on radar detectors and focussed their attention on the system reliability and safety aspects. In particular, the radar sensor is identified as the critical component and the configurations analysed accordingly.

Paolo Pinceti, Micaela Caserza Magro, Enrico De Paola, Pierluigi Firpo, Enrico Marino
Data Acquisition, Transmission, Collection and Analysis for a Fleet of Railway Vehicles in Search of Diagnostic Rules for CBM

This paper presents a roadmap for a Company that manages a fleet of vehicles (or machineries) towards the Condition Based Maintenance that is, in principle, the most efficient maintenance policy. The paper associates to each maintenance policy its benefits and its requirements in terms of infrastructure and costs. Using the proposed roadmap, a Company can decide its strategy and can schedule the investments in terms of technologies and skills. Bombardier Transportation Italy started this roadmap few years ago, for moving from a reactive maintenance policy to a proactive policy where some key indicators are measured and monitored to optimize (and reduce) the maintenance interventions. The paper presents the first results achieved by means of an analytical tool developed together with the Dept. DITEN of the University of Genoa applied to the fleet of Bombardier locomotives in Europe. Two examples of statistical analysis on the data collected from the fleet of vehicles of Bombardier in Europe show how even very simple analytics may lead to important technological and economical results.

Bortolino Saggin, Luigi Buzzi, Luca Cornolti, Hermes Giberti, Marco Tarabini, Diego Scaccabarozzi
Non-contact measurement of the temperature profile of PET preforms

This paper describes a method for the measurement of the internal and external temperature profiles of PET preforms used in the Injection Stretch Blow Moulding (ISBM) process. Temperature is the most critical parameter for the process quality, but no online measuring system has yet been implemented. The proposed system is based on two thermopiles for the identification of the internal temperature profile and a thermal camera for the measurement of the external temperature profile. The adopted sensors have been individually calibrated and the measurement uncertainty budget proved that the sensor’s instrumental uncertainty is not the actual limiting factor for the system accuracy. The main accuracy limitations derive from the emissivity of the materials of PET preforms. The use of average emissivity values increases the measurement uncertainty to 1.4 °C, a value that is judged acceptable in this specific application.

Lorenzo Ferrari, Valeria Marona, Simona Ieffa, Maurizio Sansotera, Walter Navarrini, Giuseppe Nano, Luca Magagnin
Aquivion ionomer based electrochemical sensor for ammonia detection

Electrochemical and capacitive sensors based on Aquivion® D83-06A as sensing element are designed and tested. Electrodes are produced by modifying the sensing element with KOH and/or MWCNTs addition, and casting it on the surface of stainless steel plates. A sandwich sensor is obtained by coupling two steel plates with the thickened Aquivion® D83-06A layer. Devices are tested for ammonia sensing in the range 10-100 ppm in liquid, obtaining an electrochemical and capacitive response in presence of the analyte.

Loredana Cristaldi, Mohamed Khalil, Payam Soulatiantork
Reliability assessment of photovoltaic balance of systems

The Photovoltaic (PV) system is divided mainly into two subsystems; PV modules and balance of system (BoS) subsystems. This work shows two approaches for a reliability analysis on the subsystem level of BoS; Failure mode effects criticality analysis (FMECA) and Markov Process. FMECA concerns the root causes of failures and introduces prioritization numbers to highlight critical components of BoS. Meanwhile, Markov process is a reliability methodology that aims to predict the probability of success and failure of BoS. In this way, Markov process is a supportive tool for helping decisionmakers to judge the criticality of failures associated with the operation of PV systems. The Novelty of the proposed methodologies stems from analyzing the roots of failure causes of BoS components and estimating the probability of failure of these components in order to improve the early development of BoS, enhance maintenance management, and satisfy the demanding reliability by electric utilities.