Proceedings

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.

An application of the remote maintenance paradigm to semi-automated machines

The increasing need of fast maintenance on machines when issues arise, and the always-increasing globalization, requires companies to find new ways for assisting customers, which can be all over the world, in a fast and economic way. It is no longer possible to send out technicians wherever a maintenance is needed because this intervention has large costs in terms of time and money. If many solutions have been proposed in the context of automated machines and plants, still some research has to be carried out in the area of semi-automated machines. In fact, the behavior of such machines could...

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...

Diagnostics preventive evaluation, the role of IEC 61709

Complex systems need to be fault tolerant, hence diagnostics play a key role for obtaining reliability and availability objectives. Diagnostics figures need to be predicted during the design and development phase, IEC 61709 provides support in performing such a prediction allowing to calculate failure rates in different conditions and also providing failure modes for electric components.

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...

Using Ambient Light Sensors in Smartphones for Evaluating Indoor Lighting Conditions

This paper discusses opportunities for collecting data on lighting conditions in indoor environments with the help of ambient light sensors in smartphones. Environmental data is needed to allocate the most beneficial location for solar energy harvesters on the one hand and provide energy predictions for their users on the other. Here, we focus on the illumination of surfaces and the use of ambient light sensors to measure the amount of light intensity. A comparison of sensors in different smartphones such as entry-level devices, mid-range and flagship phones is presented and the obtained...

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.

In-situ Monitoring of Metal Additive Manufacturing Processes: Sensing and Intelligent Data Analysis

Metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes have gained an increasing interest in many sectors as they provide novel production capabilities that may fit new challenging applications. However, regardless of their great potentials, the actual usage of metal AM systems in the industry is still limited by different issues. Among them, the problems related with the quality, capability and repeatability of additive processes represents a major issue, which imposes the need for novel and advanced sensing and monitoring solutions. This study reviews the quality issues in metal AM processes and...

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...

Effects of extended operating conditions in pump-turbines