Design methodology for smart actuator services for machine tool and machining control and monitoring

This paper presents a methodology to design the services of smart actuators for machine tools. The smart actuators aim at replacing the traditional drives (spindles and feed-drives) and enable to add data processing abilities to implement monitoring and control tasks. Their data processing abilities are also exploited in order to create a new decision level at the machine level. The aim of this decision level is to react to disturbances that the monitoring tasks detect. The cooperation between the computational objects (the smart spindle, the smart feed-drives and the CNC unit) enables to carry out functions for accommodating or adapting to the disturbances. This leads to the extension of the notion of smart actuator with the notion of agent. In order to implement the services of the smart drives, a general design is presented describing the services as well as the behavior of the smart drive according to the object oriented approach. Requirements about the CNC unit are detailed. Eventually, an implementation of the smart drive services that involves a virtual lathe and a virtual turning operation is described. This description is part of the design methodology. Experimental results obtained thanks to the virtual machine are then presented

Distributed machining control and monitoring using smart sensors/actuators

The study of smart sensors and actuators led, during the past few years, to the development of facilities which improve traditional sensors and actuators in a necessary way to automate production systems. In an other context, many studies are carried out aiming at defining a decisional structure for production activity control and the increasing need of reactivity leads to the autonomization of decisional levels close to the operational system. We suggest in this paper to study the natural convergence between these two approaches and we propose an integration architecture dealing with machine tool and machining control that enables the exploitation of distributed smart sensors and actuators in the decisional system

Wear rate-state interactions within a multi-component system : a study of a gearbox accelerated life testing platform

The degradation process of complex multi-component systems is highly stochastic in nature. A major side effect of this complexity is that components of such systems may have unexpected reduced life and faults and failures that decrease the reliability of multi-component systems in industrial environments. In this work we provide maintenance practitioners with an explanation of the nature of some of these unpredictable events, namely the degradation interactions that take place between components. We begin by presenting a general wear model where the degradation process of a component may be dependent on the operating conditions, the component’s own state, and the state of the other components. We then present our methodology for extracting accurate health indicators from multi-component systems by means of a time-frequency domain analysis. Finally we present a multi-component system degradation analysis of experimental data generated by a gearbox accelerated life testing platform. In so doing, we demonstrate the importance of modelling the interactions between the system components by showing their effect on component lifetime reduction

Malfunction and Bad Behavior Diagnosis on Domestic Environment

Abstract Greenhouse gas emissions from homes arise primarily from fossil fuels burned for heat, the use of products that contain greenhouse gases, and the handling of waste. Human activities are responsible for almost all of the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the last 150 years. The household sector is one of the biggest aggregate consumers and this is the reason why increasingly policies have been considering it. One of the key factors in curbing energy consumption in this sector is widely recognized to be due to erroneous behaviors and systems malfunctioning, mainly explained by the lack of awareness of the final user; so, training the final user to energy awareness can be more effective and cheaper than other policies. In this context, energy management in homes is playing, and will play even more in future, a key role in increasing the final consumer awareness towards its own energy consumption and consequently in bursting its active role in smart grids. The aim of this paper is to highlight the economic benefits of low cost intelligent control domestic devices, to identify energy behavior, system status and improve energy efficiency. The scope is to develop interaction between final users to create a network of energy consumption efficiency. The paper presents an application of Multi-scale Principal Component Analysis to diagnose inefficient occupant behavior and systems malfunctioning and suggest good practices of energy conservation

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

Civil space technology initiative

The Civil Space Technology Initiative (CSTI) is a major, focused, space technology program of the Office of Aeronautics, Exploration and Technology (OAET) of NASA. The program was initiated to advance technology beyond basic research in order to expand and enhance system and vehicle capabilities for near-term missions. CSTI takes critical technologies to the point at which a user can confidently incorporate the new or expanded capabilities into relatively near-term, high-priority NASA missions. In particular, the CSTI program emphasizes technologies necessary for reliable and efficient access to and operation in Earth orbit as well as for support of scientific missions from Earth orbit