Flexible platform with wireless interface for DC-motor remote control

Several portable applications, such as small electric vehicles and power tools, often require the use of direct current (DC) motors that significantly differ from one to another in terms of power, torque, and driving techniques. New market requirements of these applications suggest the implementation of smart user interfaces that may allow the introduction of those devices in the new Internet of Things paradigm by making them connected. This paper discusses the design and verification of a flexible platform able to drive different types of DC motors that is also provided with a Bluetooth connection for remote control and monitoring. As the platform can drive different motors with different driving techniques, it provides standardisation and cost reduction in the production of a set of tools. Two gardening tools are used as case study to verify the design and flexibility of the board. Both tools are successfully controlled and monitored with a wireless connected remote user interface

The design and evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks for applications in industrial locations

In manufacturing industries, there exist many applications where Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN\u27s) are integrated to provide wireless solution for the automated manufacturing processes. It is well known that industrial environments characterized by extreme conditions such as high temperature, pressure, and electromagnetic (EM) interference that can affect the performance of the WSN\u27s. The key solution to overcome this performance issue is by monitoring the received Signal Strength Index (RSSI) at the received sensor of the WSN device and track frame error rate of wireless packets. ZigBee is a wireless sensor network (WSN) standard designed for specific needs of the remote monitoring sensor system. Zigbee networks can be established by three different topologies: start, hybrid, and mesh. In this research project, the interest in analyzing the characteristics of the Zigbee performance was completed using a star topology network. Three performance parameters were obtained: the RSSI signal to monitor the received wireless packets from the sending node, path-lost exponent to determine the effect of industrial environment on wireless signals, and the frame error rate to know the discontinue time. The study was in three phases and took place in two settings: The first was at the manufacturing laboratory at the University of Northern Iowa, the second and the third were at the facility of a Midwestern manufacturing company. The study aimed to provide an analytical tool to evaluate the performances of Zigbee networks in industrial environments and compare the results to show that harsh environments do affect its performance. The study also involved testing the performance of WSN. This was done by simulating input/output Line passing with digital and analog data. Packets were sent from one node and counted at the receiving side to measure the packet error rate of WSN in industrial environment. In conclusion, investigating the WSN\u27s systems performance in industrial environment provides is crucial to identify the effects of the harsh conditions. It is necessary to run similar investigation to prevent the malfunction of the manufacturing applications. Testing a simple WSN in industrial environment can be capable of predicting the performance of the network. It is also recommended to have an embedded approach to WSN applications that can self-monitor its performance

Open source SCADA systems for small renewable power generation

Low cost monitoring and control is essential for small renewable power systems. While large renewable power systems can use existing commercial technology for monitoring and control, that is not cost-effective for small renewable generation. Such small assets require cost-effective, flexible, secure, and reliable real-time coordinated data monitoring and control systems. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is the perfect technology for this task. The available commercial SCADA solutions are mostly pricey and economically unjustifiable for smaller applications. They also pose interoperability issues with the existing components which are often from multiple vendors. Therefore, an open source SCADA system represents the most flexible and the most cost-effective SCADA solution. This thesis has been done in two phases. The first phase demonstrates the design and dynamic simulation of a small hybrid power system with a renewable power generation system as a case study. In the second phase, after an extensive study of the proven commercial SCADA solutions and some open source SCADA packages, three different secure, reliable, low-cost open source SCADA options are developed using the most recent SCADA architecture, the Internet of Things. The implemented prototypes of the three open source SCADA systems were tested extensively with a small renewable power system (a solar PV system). The results show that the developed open source SCADA systems perform optimally and accurately, and could serve as viable options for smaller applications such as renewable generation that cannot afford commercial SCADA solutions

Secure Large Scale Penetration of Electric Vehicles in the Power Grid

As part of the approaches used to meet climate goals set by international environmental agreements, policies are being applied worldwide for promoting the uptake of Electric Vehicles (EV)s. The resulting increase in EV sales and the accompanying expansion in the EV charging infrastructure carry along many challenges, mostly infrastructure-related. A pressing need arises to strengthen the power grid to handle and better manage the electricity demand by this mobile and geo-distributed load. Because the levels of penetration of EVs in the power grid have recently started increasing with the increase in EV sales, the real-time management of en-route EVs, before they connect to the grid, is quite recent and not many research works can be found in the literature covering this topic comprehensively. In this dissertation, advances and novel ideas are developed and presented, seizing the opportunities lying in this mobile load and addressing various challenges that arise in the application of public charging for EVs. A Bilateral Decision Support System (BDSS) is developed here for the management of en-route EVs. The BDSS is a middleware-based MAS that achieves a win-win situation for the EVs and the power grid. In this framework, the two are complementary in a way that the desired benefit of one cannot be achieved without attaining that of the other. A Fuzzy Logic based on-board module is developed for supporting the decision of the EV as to which charging station to charge at. GPU computing is used in the higher-end agents to handle the big amount of data resulting in such a large scale system with mobile and geo-distributed nodes. Cyber security risks that threaten the BDSS are assessed and measures are applied to revoke possible attacks. Furthermore, the Collective Distribution of Mobile Loads (CDML), a service with ancillary potential to the power system, is developed. It comprises a system-level optimization. In this service, the EVs requesting a public charging session are collectively redistributed onto charging stations with the objective of achieving the optimal and secure operation of the power system by reducing active power losses in normal conditions and mitigating line congestions in contingency conditions. The CDML uses the BDSS as an industrially viable tool to achieve the outcomes of the optimization in real time. By participating in this service, the EV is considered as an interacting node in the system-wide communication platform, providing both enhanced self-convenience in terms of access to public chargers, and contribution to the collective effort of providing benefit to the power system under the large scale uptake of EVs. On the EV charger level, several advantages have been reported favoring wireless charging of EVs over wired charging. Given that, new techniques are presented that facilitate the optimization of the magnetic link of wireless EV chargers while considering international EMC standards. The original techniques and developments presented in this dissertation were experimentally verified at the Energy Systems Research Laboratory at FIU

IoT-based control and monitoring system of a solar-powered brushless dc motor for agro-machines – the case of a Tanzanian-made oil press machine

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Embedded and Mobile Systems of the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and TechnologyThe impulse in designing local agricultural machinery for curbing post-harvest losses in most African countries particularly Tanzania is unmatched. Locally made agricultural machines have proven to elevate the life of many small-scale farmers, which has increased the need to incorporate machine drives and controls to ease the process and operations. With potentials in Solar Energy, powering machine drive systems that operate in off-grid areas has been the best solution. Using the principles of Internet of Things (IoT) together with advancement in motor designs and readily available off the shelf microcontrollers such as the Raspberry Pi and Arduino UNO in the market, we achieve machinery that caters for our needs and the local content. Mobile apps play a huge role in industrialization where monitoring and even controls of machines can be performed by the mobile phones. This project incorporated Agile-Scrum methods to develop a control and monitoring system for a locally made avocado oil extraction machine that is powered by a solar system with 1600W panel arrays and 800Ah battery pack, and uses a Brushless Direct Current Motor coupled with electric solenoid valve, relay modules and a controller unit assisting on the control process and collecting crucial motor operation data such as voltage and current. The designed Mobile app ‘Blue’ acquire motor operation data from the Raspberry Pi via Bluetooth technology, delivering data to cloud server for later analysis. Easing data acquisition in off grid areas when engineers, technicians or operators have a physical access to the stations. It was concluded that this novel design would provide an effective control and monitoring mechanism with an acceptance on reliability, usability and effectiveness of up to 85.65% for a plethora of locally-made machinery that available in the market which still uses the manual means of operation emphasizing ease of use and productivity, thence joining hands with the global world on attaining some of the Sustainable Development Goals

Design and development of a multi-axis controlled thermal scanner

Surface temperature measurement is applicable to a vast number of fields including manufacturing, processing, agricultural, medical and pharmaceutical fields just to name a few. Two methods for obtaining surface temperature measurements exist; ‘surface contact measurement’ in which the measuring device makes physical contact with the surface in question or alternatively, ‘non-contact surface measurement’ where there is no contact at all. Both of these methods have got advantages, as well as disadvantages. However, in recent times, non-contact methods have been preferred since they are non-intrusive and allow for remote measurements to be made. In this research, a non-contact mobile temperature measurement system is developed. The system is microcontroller-based and uses infrared sensors to acquire temperature measurements. The infrared sensors are mounted on a three-axes, x-y-z coordinate system which allows a thermal profile of a particular surface to be generated and displayed on a Graphical User Interface (GUI) in real-time. Various tests were carried out to compare contact and non-contact measurement methods; to determine the most suitable operating height for accurate non-contact measurement given a specific surface and to investigate the benefit of single and/ or multiple sensor arrangements. The research showed that a non-contact thermal scanning system could be used to obtain detailed yet accurate surface temperature measurements following an initial sensor calibration phase to determine the most favourable scanning parameters for a particular surface. The measurements taken could then be used to generate a thermal map of a surface with a significant improvement in resolution as compared with measurements taken using contact devices. The research further showed that a multiple sensor arrangement significantly reduced the time taken to generate the thermal profiles without undermining accuracy

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

냉장고 운영 소프트웨어 개발을 위한 가상화, 자동화, 원격제어 기반의 플랫폼 구축

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 농생명공학부, 2014. 2. 최영진.식품은 성장, 회복, 생명 유지에 필요한 과정을 지속하고 에너지를 공급하기 위해 생명체의 몸에 사용되는 필수적인 단백질, 탄수화물, 지방으로 구성된 물질이다. 이러한 식품은 채집이나 사냥을 통해서 얻어 지거나, 농사나 사육을 통해 얻어진다. 그리고 이들을 오랜 시간 동안 보존하기 위해서, 다양한 방법들이 개발 및 응용되었다. 그 중 날 것 상태의 품질에 가장 가깝게 보관할 수 있는 보편적인 방법이 냉장고를 이용한 냉장 및 냉동 보관이다. 현재의 대부분의 냉장고는 하드웨어를 구축한 후에 소프트웨어를 설치하여 운용을 한다. 그리고 현재 개발 과정에서 하드웨어가 개발되기 전에는 소프트웨어를 검증하기가 매우 어렵다. 이를 극복하고자 가상 환경의 시뮬레이션과 냉장고의 에뮬레이션 값들이 서로 반영되면서 소프트웨어를 개발 및 검증할 수 있는 개발 환경을 연구 및 구축고자 한다. 소비자가 선호하고 경쟁력 있는 냉장고의 필수 요소 중 하나가 낮은 소비 전력이고, 국가에 따라서는 에너지 사용량을 규제하여 판매를 금지하는 곳도 있다. 소비 전력을 최적화하기 위해서 소프트웨어 알고리즘 및 운전 파라미터 변경을 통해 많은 시험을 거치는 과정이 필요하다. 이는 인적 및 시간적 낭비를 가져온다. 이를 해결하기 위해, 가상 환경에서 개발한 소프트웨어를 실제의 냉장고에 이식하고, 개발된 자동 시험 솔루션을 통해 최적화된 파라미터를 찾고자 한다. 이런 완벽한 절차로 개발된 냉장고는 소비자에게 판매가 되고, 가혹한 시험 환경에서 테스트를 했음에도 불구하고, 실제 사용 환경에서 사용하면 반드시 알 수 없는 오류를 발생한다. 이를 분석하기 위해서 초기 생산품은 사용 데이터를 일정 시간 동안 수집하게 된다. 하지만, 기존에 수동적으로 사후 데이터를 수집하는 방법에는 여러 불편함과 실시간으로 대응을 할 수 없는 문제가 있다. 그래서 원격 모니터링 방법을 통해 실시간으로 수집된 데이터를 분석하고 오류에 대응하고자 했다. 또한, 이렇게 수집된 빅 데이터를 통해, 차후에 개발될 냉장고에 더 좋은 사용자 경험을 반영 하고자 한다. 냉장고 개발을 위한 새로운 접근 방법에 대한 연구는 잘 수행되고 있으며, 앞으로 여러 가전에 확대 응용하고 더 좋은 가치를 사용자에게 제공하고자 한다.Food is material mainly consisting of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain processes essential for growth, recovery and life support and to furnish energy. In general, food is obtained through collecting plants or animals, hunting, farming and livestock breeding. Various methods have been developed and implemented to preserve food for a long period of time. The most common way to preserve food almost in the raw is to use a refrigerator or a freezer. Currently, most freezers are operated after installing hardware and then software. And, in the current development process, it is very difficult to verify software before hardware is completely developed. In order to solve this problem, this study is to seek and establish an environment where software can be developed and verified by reflecting both values of the virtual environment simulation and the freezer emulation. One of the requirements of a competitive and favored freezer wanted by customers is low electric power consumption. Some countries restrict the amount of energy consumed and prevent the sales of the home appliance with energy consumption exceeding the standards. In order to optimize the electric power consumption, many tests should be conducted by changing software algorithms and operation parameters. However, too much time and human resources and time can be wasted during the process. To solve this problem, software which is developed in the virtual environment will be ported into an actual freezer, and the optimized parameter will be found through an automatic experiment solution. Even though the refrigerator was developed though the perfect processes stated above, and all the required tests were executed under the strict test condition, unexpected errors can appear when it is used by consumers in the real environment. In an effort to analyze these errors, data from the initial products is collected for a certain period of time. However, it is hard to respond to problems in real time with a method of collecting data only after problems are found. Therefore, data will be analyzed in real time, and errors will be responded through the remote monitoring method. Also, this big data will be reflected in the better user experience (UX) of the next- generation refrigerator. Studies on new methods to develop a refrigerator and a freezer were executed well, and in the future, this technique will be applied to diverse home appliances and will provide the better to the customers.CONTENTS ABSTRACT......................................................................................................i CONTENTS....................................................................................................iv LIST OF TABLES.........................................................................................x LIST OF FIGURES......................................................................................xi CHAPTER 1 Freezer Program Emulation Method in the Virtual Simulation Environment Using Virtual Product Software Development Process (VPSDP) Abstract...........................................................................................................2 I. Introduction................................................................................................4 1.1. Review.............................................................................................................4 1.2. Environmental virtualization..........................................................................8 1.3. The objective of this study...........................................................................12 II. Materials and Methods....................................................20 2.1. Model system and equations.................................................................20 2.2. The characteristics of the air and equations............................................27 2.3. Designable food and equations....................................................................29 2.4. Experimental system configuration....................................................32 2.5. Virtualization concept.............................................................40 2.6. Algorithm design for the virtual system.................................42 2.7. Overall software architecture.................................................46 2.8. GUI composition.............................................................................50 2.8.1. Chart Area..................................................................................................50 2.8.2. Indicators Area.....................................................................................................50 2.8.3. Communication and Data Storage Settings Area............................................51 2.8.4. Virtual Environment Settings area and The Food Area..................................51 2.9. Program flow to emulate the freezer controller (or PLC)....................................53 2.10. Program flow to simulate the virtual environment..........................................65 2.11. How to exchange the data of emulator and simulator .....................................66 III. Results and Discussion....................................................................69 3.1. The simulated experiment system..................................................................69 3.2. The developed virtual system program............................................74 3.3. Completed model Functions........................................................78 3.4. Node No.1 Calculation Function.....................................................79 3.5. Node from No.2 to No.(n-2) Calculation Function.......................80 3.6. Node No.(n-1) Calculation Function..........................................81 3.7. Node No.n Calculation Function.....................................................82 3.8. The numerical data vs. the actual data.........................................83 IV. Conclusion..................................................................87 V. Nomenclature...............................................................88 VI. References....................................................................89   CHAPTER 2 Novel Method to Optimize the Energy Efficiency of Freezer using Automatic Test Software Abstract..........................................................................95 I. Introduction.....................................................................97 1.1. Review.................................................................................................................97 1.2. History of refrigeration system......................................................................101 1.3. History of domestic freezer and refrigerator...........................................................104 1.4. History of optimum designs.....................................................................................110 II. Materials and Methods....................................................113 2.1. Experimental systems control.............................................................113 2.2. Choice of methods and factors.........................................................115 2.3. In-depth test algorithm flow............................................................121 2.4. GUI of the automatic experiment program.............................................123 2.5. Test optimization method......................................................................125 2.6. Annual electric power consumption calculation method.....................133 III. Results and Discussion.................................................135 3.1. Completed program..........................................................135 3.2. Experimental analysis......................................................137 3.2.1. Partial Least Squares..........................................................137 3.2.2. Multiple Regression Analysis............................................150 3.2.3. Two-level Full Factorial Designs...............................................157 3.2.4. Optimization..............................................................................172 IV. Conclusion....................................................................177 V. References......................................................................179   CHAPTER 3 The Remote Monitoring System Construction in Order to Verify the Field Test of the Developed Refrigerator and Acquire the Big Data Used for the Improvement of User Experience (UX) Abstract..........................................................................188 I. Introduction......................................................................................................189 1.1. Review................................................................................................189 II. Materials and Methods..............................................................192 2.1. Hardware design.......................................................................................192 2.2. Server, clients and networks..................................................................197 2.3. Software development............................................................................200 2.3.1. The software for operating the FSF......................................200 2.3.2. Client data acquisition software...........................................202 2.3.3. Web Service..................................................................205 III. Results and discussion..................................................207 3.1. Operation condition.........................................................................................207 3.2. The use pattern analysis.....................................................................................209 IV. Conclusion.....................................................................216 V. References.....................................................................218 Appendices Appendix A. Simulation source with Visual C++.......221 [VirtualFreezerDlg.h]...................................................221 [VirtualFreezerDlg.cpp]..............................................226 Appendix B. Emulation source with C++....................256 [moacon.cpp(with simulator)].....................................258 [Emulator.cpp].............................................................264 Korean Abstract 초록.............................................................................................282Docto

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Design of an intelligent embedded system for condition monitoring of an industrial robot

PhD ThesisIndustrial robots have long been used in production systems in order to improve productivity, quality and safety in automated manufacturing processes. There are significant implications for operator safety in the event of a robot malfunction or failure, and an unforeseen robot stoppage, due to different reasons, has the potential to cause an interruption in the entire production line, resulting in economic and production losses. Condition monitoring (CM) is a type of maintenance inspection technique by which an operational asset is monitored and the data obtained is analysed to detect signs of degradation, diagnose the causes of faults and thus reduce maintenance costs. So, the main focus of this research is to design and develop an online, intelligent CM system based on wireless embedded technology to detect and diagnose the most common faults in the transmission systems (gears and bearings) of the industrial robot joints using vibration signal analysis. To this end an old, but operational, PUMA 560 robot was utilized to synthesize a number of different transmission faults in one of the joints (3 - elbow), such as backlash between the gear pair, gear tooth and bearing faults. A two-stage condition monitoring algorithm is proposed for robot health assessment, incorporating fault detection and fault diagnosis. Signal processing techniques play a significant role in building any condition monitoring system, in order to determine fault-symptom relationships, and detect abnormalities in robot health. Fault detection stage is based on time-domain signal analysis and a statistical control chart (SCC) technique. For accurate fault diagnosis in the second stage, a novel implementation of a time-frequency signal analysis technique based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is adopted. In this technique, vibration signals are decomposed into eight levels of wavelet coefficients and statistical features, such as standard deviation, kurtosis and skewness, are obtained at each level and analysed to extract the most salient feature related to faults; the artificial neural network (ANN) is then used for fault classification. A data acquisition system based on National Instruments (NI) software and hardware was initially developed for preliminary robot vibration analysis and feature extraction. The transmission faults induced in the robot can change the captured vibration spectra, and the robot’s natural frequencies were established using experimental modal analysis, and also the fundamental fault frequencies for the gear transmission and bearings were obtained and utilized for preliminary robot condition monitoring. In addition to simulation of different levels of backlash fault, gear tooth and bearing faults which have not been previously investigated in industrial robots, with several levels of ii severity, were successfully simulated and detected in the robot’s joint transmission. The vibration features extracted, which are related to the robot healthy state and different fault types, using the data acquisition system were subsequently used in building the SCC and ANN, which were trained using part of the measured data set that represents the robot operating range. Another set of data, not used within the training stage, was then utilized for validation. The results indicate the successful detection and diagnosis of faults using the key extracted parameters. A wireless embedded system based on the ZigBee communication protocol was designed for the application of the proposed CM algorithm in real-time, using an Arduino DUE as the core of the wireless sensor unit attached on the robot arm. A Texas Instruments digital signal processor (TMS320C6713 DSK board) was used as the base station of the wireless system on which the robot’s fault diagnosis algorithm is run. To implement the two stages of the proposed CM algorithm on the designed embedded system, software based on the C programming language has been developed. To demonstrate the reliability of the designed wireless CM system, experimental validations were performed, and high reliability was shown in the detection and diagnosis of several seeded faults in the robot. Optimistically, the established wireless embedded system could be envisaged for fault detection and diagnostics on any type of rotating machine, with the monitoring system realized using vibration signal analysis. Furthermore, with some modifications to the system’s hardware and software, different CM techniques such as acoustic emission (AE) analysis or motor current signature analysis (MCSA), can be applied.Iraqi government, represented by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the Iraqi Cultural Attaché in London, and the University of Technology in Baghda