Marco Tarabini, Luca Cornolti, Bortolino Saggin, Hermes Giberti, Diego Scaccabarozzi
Non-Contact Techniques for the Quality Analysis of PET Bottles

This work was motivated from finding a complementary way of tuning and controlling the machine parameters of Injection Stretch Blow Molding process. In the current approach, a specialized technician detects the bottle defects by visual inspection and corrects the machine parameters using its own experience or indications obtained by previous statistical analyses. As all human based operations, inherent limitations are that the results are influenced by the operator skills; in addition, the experience can be hardly converted into a database, which could be used for the process optimization. The solution investigated in this work is to replace visual inspection with an image processing system. A prototype for offline analyses of PET bottles was designed in order to have a resolution allowing to identify the most common bottle defects. The acquired images were analyzed with algorithms implemented in LabVIEW. Results showed that this system can off-center gate, haze and pearlescence with a repeatability and reproducibility sufficient for the identification of bottles with manufacturing defects.

Tore Leikanger, Juha Häkkinen, Christian Schuss
Interfacing External Sensors with Android Smartphones through Near Field Communication

In this paper, a new approach to communicate with inter-integrated circuit (I2C) enabled circuits such as sensors, over Near Field Communication (NFC) is presented and evaluated. The NFC-to-I2C interface was designed using a non-standard NFC command to control the I2C bus directly from a smartphone, which was controlling both read and write operations on the I2C bus. The NFC-to-I2C interface was reporting back the data bytes on the bus to the smartphone when the transaction was done. This system was tested in action both with write and read requests to a commercial microcontroller featuring a hardware I2C port, as well as reading a commercial I2C enabled humidity and temperature sensor. The results of the experimental tests of the system show that this approach gives an easy interface between the smartphone and external sensors, which is useful for the smartphone user.

Andrea Caviglia, Micaela Caserza Magro, Paolo Pinceti, Marco Antonelli, Enrico De Paola, Enrico Marino
Methods, Techniques and Algorithms for Condition Based Maintenance of Railway Vehicles

Industrial Companies must avoid productivity losses due to low availability of equipment and machinery that cause high maintenance costs. In response to this concern, Companies try improving their maintenance policies over the years. Increasing the effectiveness of maintenance implies switching from simply reacting to machinery breakdowns (corrective maintenance - CM), to executing timebased preventive maintenance (PM). Today’s emphasis is on the ability of detecting early degradation through condition based maintenance (CBM) practices. Each policy offers a different level of performances, and it requires a different amount of data for its actuation.
This paper analyses methods to implement CBM for a fleet of locomotives. It presents the description of the Automatic Vehicle Inspection System (AVIS), to deliver a revolutionary integrated solution that could become a game changer in the rolling stock maintenance industry. A Company can implement a Condition- Based Maintenance solution with the usage of the AVIS System and a data conditioning and analysis software like OSIsoft PI System. The paper also highlights the reasons for choosing this type of maintenance policy and for using the PI System to collect operations and manufacturing data.
The results have been achieved making use at the same time of the PI System (that manages the database) and Matlab (that manages data) applied to the fleet of railway vehicles. The possibilities with this system are endless, since with its flexibility, adding new features is very easy. Results show different aspects for a good maintenance policy: reliable and high quality measurements are important; a condition-based maintenance would provide longer life of the components compared to the current policy; at the end, a new maintenance policy would result in high savings for the Company.

Luigino Benetazzo, Matteo Bertocco, Umberto Bovo, Guglielmo Frigo, Maria Paola Genovese, Claudio Narduzzi
Characterisation of a wood pole tester

Wood is widely employed to support aerial cables for electrical energy and telecommunication networks. Being a natural material, it is subject to decay, which requires periodic structural inspections. This paper present the metrological analysis of a vibration-based pole testing system, taking into account different contributions to uncertainty as well as the effects of natural variability of wood properties. The study allows to evidence the main features and intrinsic limits of the test approach and shows how performance bounds have been evaluated.

Morris Brenna, Federica Foiadelli, Michela Longo, Dario Zaninelli
Optical Sensors for Railway Infrastructure Monitoring

The goodness of the current collection of the pantograph from the contact line in railway vehicles requires many analyses on the dynamics of their interaction. To this purpose, it is necessary a monitoring system that is able to control the sensitive parameters that describe the real status of the components involved. The scope of this research is framed in the context of the systems for the monitoring of the contact line and its interaction with the pantograph due to the running of trains in 3,000 VDC railway lines. In particular, the optical technology is proposed for the measuring of the catenary height.
A measurement campaign has been carried out in the year 2014 and the recorded data have been treated through a dedicated algorithm in order to define suitable indices and thresholds that allow to understand the goodness or the badness of the current collection.