Gianluca Pizzuti, Francesco Lamonaca, Natale Arcuri
Data Acquisition for Green Roof

Green roof represents a sustainable solution in urban environment providing several benefits such as ecological advantages, stormwater management and energy saving. Numerous studies have focused on the evaluation of the efficiency of green roof by monitoring thermo-physical variables. Whereas most of the studies have been conducted in cold weather conditions, only little research has been performed in Mediterranean climate. An extensive green roof, divided into four compartments, characterized by different layers and materials is built on the 46C Building at the University of Calabria (Italy), in order to analyse the effect of the diverse components on thermo-physical behaviour of the system. The experimental site is equipped with measurement instrumentation and data acquisition system to continuously monitor thermo-physical parameters, such as temperature and water content throughout the entire stratigraphy. The monitoring data will be used for evaluating the thermo-physical behaviour of the green roof in Mediterranean climate.

Dario Di Cara, Mario Luiso, Gianffranco Miele, Paolo Sommella
A smart measurement network for optimization of electrical grid operation

The electrical grid was historically created to collect large amounts of energy from generating stations and distribute them to a large number of consumers .With the advent of diffused generation, mainly produced from renewable energy sources, this classical view of the electrical grid must be completely revised. A new control system, which integrates electronics and telecommunications, is now required. Therefore, the aim of the paper is the development of a new smart measurement network, which allows the optimization of the management of a Smart Grid with a wide presence of power generation from renewable sources and decentralized storage systems.

Antoine Bonnetat, Jean-Michel Hodé, Dominique Dallet, Guillaume Ferré
A frequency independent method for adaptive correction of Time Interleaved Analog to Digital Converters

Time-Interleaved Analog-to-Digital Converters (TIADC) are well-known as an efficient solution to increase sampling rate. However manufacturing process introduces static errors which limit TIADC performance. In this paper, we propose to improve an existing method based on a fully blind digital solution using an adaptive least mean squares (LMS) filter to correct gain, offset and timing mismatch. Indeed, due to interpolation operation, that solution was not frequency independent. Therefore we propose a novel architecture which is still based on adaptive filtering while dealing with frequency limitation. Numerical simulation results will be provided to validate the efficiency of our method.

Tarcísio Oliveira de Moraes Júnior, Yuri Percy Molina Rodriguez, Ewerton Cleudson de Sousa Melo, Cleonilson Protásio de Souza
Experimental Results on Magnetic Cores for Magnetic Induction-Based Energy Harvesting

In this work it is presented an energy harvesting system based on disperse magnetic energy produced by electric current across power line of a power distribution network in order to supply energy for devices in a wireless sensor network. The system is based on toroidal cores tested and validated with different materials and dimensions (five based on ferrite, seven based on nanocrystalline, seven based on iron powder) aiming harvesting optimal power device. From principles of magnetic ferromagnetic materials, it is discussed the magnetic field theory to obtain energy for supplying power to devices. It was implemented a prototype consisting of a test bench capable of emulating power-line high currents and of a power conditioning circuit. Test procedures were executed in three parts. The first was to determine the magnetic parameters (e.g. relative permeability and magnetic curve) of each harvester using a circuit able to measure core permeability in order to obtain B x H cycle. The second was to test a proposed power conditioning circuit composed of an AC/DC rectifier and a voltage regulator. The third, the experimental results were compared with theoretical ones. The obtained experimental results have been in agreement with theory, showing that the energy harvesting system is capable of supplying up to 315.6 mW from ferrite based core, 54mW from nanocrystalline based cores and 0.77 mW from iron powder based ones, by capturing magnetic dispersion produced by a 15 A current in the power line, which can be applied to various low power devices, mainly in wireless sensor network for data acquisition and control parameters of the power line itself.

Matteo Bertocco, Guglielmo Frigo, Claudio Narduzzi
On compressed sensing and super-resolution in DFT-based spectral analysis

The paper discusses a novel frequency interpolation and super-resolution method for multitone waveform analysis, where a compressive sensing algorithm is employed to process data. Each signal acquisition involves a short data record, whose DFT coefficients are computed. A set of compressed measurements is obtained by taking records with different known starting instants, and employed to determine, by solving an orthogonal matching pursuit problem, the set of frequency components of the analysed waveform. Interpolation is presented as a compressed sensing problem and algorithm performances discussed.