A new wireless asynchronous data communications module for industrial applications

All the sensors such as temperature, humidity, and pressure used in industry provide analog outputs as inputs for their control units. Wireless transmission of the data has advantages on wired transmission such as USB port, parallel port and serial port and therefore has great importance for industrial applications. In this work, a new wireless asynchronous data communications module has been developed to send the earth magnetic field data around a ferromagnetic material detected by a KMZ51 AMR sensor. The transmitter module transmits the analog data obtained from a source to a computer environment where they are stored and then presented in a graphical form. In this design, an amplitude shift keying (ASK) transceiver working at the frequency of 433.92 MHz which is a frequency inside the so called Industrial Scientific Medical band (ISM band) used for wireless communications. The analog data first fed into a 10-bit ADC controlled by a PIC microcontroller and then the digital data is sent to the transmitter. A preamble bit string is added in front of the data bits and another bit string for achieving synchronization and determination the start of the data is used. The data arriving at the receiver is taken by the microcontroller and sent to a LCD display as well as the serial port of a computer where it is written in a text file. A Visual Basic based graphics interface is designed to receive, store and present the data in the form of graphical shapes. In the paper, all the work has been explained in detail. © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Experimental Investigation of B4C Particulate Reinforced Aluminium 6061 Based Composite Material in Wire-Cut EDM

In the present paper, the influences of cutting parameters on surface roughness in wire electric-discharge machining of (WEDM) process of particle-reinforced aluminium AA6061 alloy composite are investigated. The composites are produced using 15% wt. B4C fraction using powder metallurgy. Experimental trials are performed based on Taguchi L18 (21×32) with a mixed orthogonal array, and the WEDM cutting parameters are optimized for the best surface quality. The investigation results are evaluated by response surface plots and main effect graphs. The machined surface of the metal matrix composite is investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs. The effect of WEDM machining variables are determined using analysis of variance (ANOVA). The analysis result shows that the most significant cutting parameter is peak current for surface roughness. The SEM and optical micrographs indicate that the reinforced B4C particles are homogeneously distributed in the matrix structure. Mathematical models are also generated using regression analysis for the surface roughness. Confirmation tests are carried out to determine the prediction performance of the mathematical models, and the surface roughness is predicted with an acceptable mean squared error.Scopu