The paper discusses the remote real time monitoring of stationary batteries operating in real condition as a strategy to reduce maintenance costs while improving their efficiency and lifecycle. Measurements of electrical quantities remotely performed through a proposed strict protocol were compared with data provided by conventional devices. Within a confidence levels of 95% and 99%, statistical analysis confirmed that the remote system build up credibility and improves the real time monitoring system.

In recent years, power line communications (PLCs) become to grow in importance due to power line diffusion and new robust communication protocols. In this paper, an overview of PLC is presented, including the advantages and disadvantages provided by different transmission protocols and related signal modulations. The state of the art in this field is discussed, focusing the attention on G3 and Prime Alliance standards. The main results obtained during the on field application of a PLC prototype are presented and discussed, underlining different modulation schemes in order to identify the most performant configuration.

In the framework of the EMRP project “ENV 58. Metrology for essential climate variables”, a new technique to perform traceable temperature measurements of the sea water profile and sea water surface will be studied, developed and applied to a real situation. This new thermometer consists on several Bragg gratings located at different points along an optical fiber, getting a thermometer based on distributed temperature sensors, that will be used to measure the sea water temperature profile. This technique will provide additional and valuable information about the evolution of the sea environment behaviour.

The pre-series of the last generation of fast digital integrators for magnetic measurements, the e-FDI, aimed at satisfying the more challenging requirements expected in the future, has been just developed and made available at CERN. The enhanced instrument improves the state of the art thanks to a high-performance analogue front-end, a new hardware for self-calibration, a finer time base speeding-up internal DSP operation, and a new peripheral bus controller for higher data throughput. The e-FDI is now undergoing the performance assessment tests and the metrological characterization. In this paper, after a short description of the e-FDI, main preliminary test results are reported and discussed.

A new approach to self-testing of the analog parts of mixed-signal electronic systems controlled by microcontrollers equipped with an ADC and a DAC is presented. It is based on a BIST and a new fault diagnosis method. A novelty is the use of the DAC as a component of the BIST, allowing to generate a stimulating signal with a quadratic function shape. It contributes to a better extraction of information about the state of the circuit under test.