Thermal Imaging for Enhancing Inspection Reliability: Detection and Characterization

Reliable performance of an equipment or structure depends on pre-service quality and in- service degradation of the equipment or structure under operating conditions. The role of non-destructive testing (NDT) is to ensure integrity, and in turn, reliability of equipment or structure. Besides, NDT can also monitor in-service degradation and to avoid premature failure of the equipments/structures and prevent accidents as well as save human life. Up to now, NDT has been used in various fields of applications such as the inspection o

Arbitrary-Oriented Detection of Insulators in Thermal Imagery via Rotation Region Network

10.13039/501100004607-Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi Province (Grant Number: 2018JJB160056); Guangxi Science and Technology Base and Talent Project (Grant Number: 2020AC19010); 10.13039/501100001809-National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 51907034)

Data Acquisition Applications

Data acquisition systems have numerous applications. This book has a total of 13 chapters and is divided into three sections: Industrial applications, Medical applications and Scientific experiments. The chapters are written by experts from around the world, while the targeted audience for this book includes professionals who are designers or researchers in the field of data acquisition systems. Faculty members and graduate students could also benefit from the book

Efficient management of environmental control within electrical substations for decarbonisation purposes

Decarbonisation of building operations is identified as a key component of national decarbonisation strategies. Reducing the energy demand of buildings is to be achieved through more stringent regulation for new construction and the retrofitting of existing stock. These are applicable to both domestic and most non-domestic building types, although no such efforts have been made to decarbonise electrical substations. Electrical substations are critical infrastructure assets that house distribution equipment enabling electricity to reach customers’ homes and business premises. To reduce the risk of damage to distribution equipment environmental, control is required to maintain specific levels of temperature and relative humidity. This research explores how these assets can be decarbonised whilst maintaining the required internal environmental conditions. Using a longitudinal case study method, three archetypal substations were subject to remote monitoring of energy consumption and environmental conditions, performance testing and energy modelling. This revealed that non-compliant humidity levels were occurring, as well as over-conditioning of temperature as a result of ineffective control systems. Consequently there was a significant performance gap detected between the measured and modelled energy consumption.Observing the monitoring results and the unique constraints of substations, a bespoke approach to retrofitting the substations was developed. Differing from more established retrofit hierarchies, this prioritised enhancement of control systems over the performance of building fabric. This ensured that the compliance of environmental conditions was guaranteed along with further decarbonisation benefits.Interventions were delivered across the three case study substations with benefits established through further monitoring of energy and environmental conditions. An overall decrease in energy consumption and payback periods between 2 and 18 years across the three sites were coupled with considerably improved environmental conditions in two sites. This study shows that the application of retrofit is applicable to substations and can result in substantial co-benefits for their operators. Whilst many of the interventions to decarbonise are not dissimilar to those applied to more established building types consideration is necessary to ensure maintaining the required environmental conditions is addressed

Modern Applications in Optics and Photonics: From Sensing and Analytics to Communication

Optics and photonics are among the key technologies of the 21st century, and offer potential for novel applications in areas such as sensing and spectroscopy, analytics, monitoring, biomedical imaging/diagnostics, and optical communication technology. The high degree of control over light fields, together with the capabilities of modern processing and integration technology, enables new optical measurement systems with enhanced functionality and sensitivity. They are attractive for a range of applications that were previously inaccessible. This Special Issue aims to provide an overview of some of the most advanced application areas in optics and photonics and indicate the broad potential for the future

Immune System Based Control and Intelligent Agent Design for Power System Applications

The National Academy of Engineering has selected the US Electric Power Grid as the supreme engineering achievement of the 20th century. Yet, this same grid is struggling to keep up with the increasing demand for electricity, its quality and cost. A growing recognition of the need to modernize the grid to meet future challenges has found articulation in the vision of a Smart Grid in using new control strategies that are intelligent, distributed, and adaptive. The objective of this work is to develop smart control systems inspired from the biological Human Immune System to better manage the power grid at the both generation and distribution levels. The work is divided into three main sections. In the first section, we addressed the problem of Automatic Generation Control design. The Clonal Selection theory is successfully applied as an optimization technique to obtain decentralized control gains that minimize a performance index based on Area Control Errors. Then the Immune Network theory is used to design adaptive controllers in order to diminish the excess maneuvering of the units and help the control areas comply with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation\u27s standards set to insure good quality of service and equitable mutual assistance by the interconnected energy balancing areas. The second section of this work addresses the design and deployment of Multi Agent Systems on both terrestrial and shipboard power systems self-healing using a novel approach based on the Immune Multi-Agent System (IMAS). The Immune System is viewed as a highly organized and distributed Multi-Cell System that strives to heal the body by working together and communicating to get rid of the pathogens. In this work both simulation and hardware design and deployment of the MAS are addressed. The third section of this work consists in developing a small scale smart circuit by modifying and upgrading the existing Analog Power Simulator to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed technologies. We showed how to develop smart Agents hardware along with a wireless communication platform and the electronic switches. After putting together the different designed pieces, the resulting Multi Agent System is integrated into the Power Simulator Hardware. The multi Agent System developed is tested for fault isolation, reconfiguration, and restoration problems by simulating a permanent three phase fault on one of the feeder lines. The experimental results show that the Multi Agent System hardware developed performed effectively and in a timely manner which confirms that this technology is very promising and a very good candidate for Smart Grid control applications

Robotic Cameraman for Augmented Reality based Broadcast and Demonstration

In recent years, a number of large enterprises have gradually begun to use vari-ous Augmented Reality technologies to prominently improve the audiences’ view oftheir products. Among them, the creation of an immersive virtual interactive scenethrough the projection has received extensive attention, and this technique refers toprojection SAR, which is short for projection spatial augmented reality. However,as the existing projection-SAR systems have immobility and limited working range,they have a huge difficulty to be accepted and used in human daily life. Therefore,this thesis research has proposed a technically feasible optimization scheme so thatit can be practically applied to AR broadcasting and demonstrations. Based on three main techniques required by state-of-art projection SAR applica-tions, this thesis has created a novel mobile projection SAR cameraman for ARbroadcasting and demonstration. Firstly, by combining the CNN scene parsingmodel and multiple contour extractors, the proposed contour extraction pipelinecan always detect the optimal contour information in non-HD or blurred images.This algorithm reduces the dependency on high quality visual sensors and solves theproblems of low contour extraction accuracy in motion blurred images. Secondly, aplane-based visual mapping algorithm is introduced to solve the difficulties of visualmapping in these low-texture scenarios. Finally, a complete process of designing theprojection SAR cameraman robot is introduced. This part has solved three mainproblems in mobile projection-SAR applications: (i) a new method for marking con-tour on projection model is proposed to replace the model rendering process. Bycombining contour features and geometric features, users can identify objects oncolourless model easily. (ii) a camera initial pose estimation method is developedbased on visual tracking algorithms, which can register the start pose of robot to thewhole scene in Unity3D. (iii) a novel data transmission approach is introduced to establishes a link between external robot and the robot in Unity3D simulation work-space. This makes the robotic cameraman can simulate its trajectory in Unity3D simulation work-space and project correct virtual content. Our proposed mobile projection SAR system has made outstanding contributionsto the academic value and practicality of the existing projection SAR technique. Itfirstly solves the problem of limited working range. When the system is running ina large indoor scene, it can follow the user and project dynamic interactive virtualcontent automatically instead of increasing the number of visual sensors. Then,it creates a more immersive experience for audience since it supports the user hasmore body gestures and richer virtual-real interactive plays. Lastly, a mobile systemdoes not require up-front frameworks and cheaper and has provided the public aninnovative choice for indoor broadcasting and exhibitions