In this paper, the authors present an extended survey on the evolution and the modern approaches in the thermal analysis of electrical machines. The improvements and the new techniques proposed in the last decade are analyzed in depth and compared in order to highlight the qualities and defects of each. In particular, thermal analysis based on lumped-parameter thermal network, finite-element analysis, and computational fluid dynamics are considered in this paper. In addition, an overview of the problems linked to the thermal parameter determination and computation is proposed and discussed. Taking into account the aims of this paper, a detailed list of books and papers is reported in the references to help researchers interested in these topics.

/pdf/evolution-and-modern-approaches-for-thermal-analysis-of-1z8m24e02a.pdf

Evolution and Modern Approaches for Thermal Analysis of Electrical Machines

An automated irrigation system was developed to optimize water use for agricultural crops. The system has a distributed wireless network of soil-moisture and temperature sensors placed in the root zone of the plants. In addition, a gateway unit handles sensor information, triggers actuators, and transmits data to a web application. An algorithm was developed with threshold values of temperature and soil moisture that was programmed into a microcontroller-based gateway to control water quantity. The system was powered by photovoltaic panels and had a duplex communication link based on a cellular-Internet interface that allowed for data inspection and irrigation scheduling to be programmed through a web page. The automated system was tested in a sage crop field for 136 days and water savings of up to 90% compared with traditional irrigation practices of the agricultural zone were achieved. Three replicas of the automated system have been used successfully in other places for 18 months. Because of its energy autonomy and low cost, the system has the potential to be useful in water limited geographically isolated areas.

Automated Irrigation System Using a Wireless Sensor Network and GPRS Module

A natural carbohydrate biopolymer was extracted from the agricultural biomass waste (durian seed). Subsequently, the crude biopolymer was purified by using the saturated barium hydroxide to minimize the impurities. Finally, the effect of different drying techniques on the flow characteristics and functional properties of the purified biopolymer was investigated. The present study elucidated the main functional characteristics such as flow characteristics, water- and oil-holding capacity, solubility, and foaming capacity. In most cases except for oven drying, the bulk density decreased, thus increasing the porosity. This might be attributed to the increase in the inter-particle voids of smaller sized particles with larger contact surface areas per unit volume. The current study revealed that oven-dried gum and freeze-dried gum had the highest and lowest compressibility index, thus indicating the weakest and strongest flowability among all samples. In the present work, the freeze-dried gum showed the lowest angle of repose, bulk, tapped and true density. This indicates the highest porosity degree of freeze dried gum among dried seed gums. It also exhibited the highest solubility, and foaming capacity thus providing the most desirable functional properties and flow characteristics among all drying techniques. The present study revealed that freeze drying among all drying techniques provided the most desirable functional properties and flow characteristics for durian seed gum.

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Effect of different drying techniques on flowability characteristics and chemical properties of natural carbohydrate-protein Gum from durian fruit seed.

A joint initiative by the British Thoracic Society and the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland was undertaken to update the 2001 guidelines for the selection and assessment of patients with lung cancer who can potentially be managed by radical treatment.

https://thorax.bmj.com/content/thoraxjnl/65/Suppl_3/iii1.full.pdf

Guidelines on the radical management of patients with lung cancer

In this paper, we present four purely textile patch antennas for Bluetooth applications in wearable computing using the frequency range around 2.4 GHz. The textile materials and the planar antenna shape provide a smooth integration into clothing while preserving the typical properties of textiles. The four antennas differ in the deployed materials and in the antenna polarization, but all of them feature a microstrip line as antenna feed. We have developed a manufacturing process that guarantees unaffected electrical behavior of the individual materials when composed to an antenna. Thus, the conductive textiles possess a sheet resistance of less than 1Omega/squarein order to keep losses at a minimum. The process also satisfies our requirements in terms of accuracy meeting the Bluetooth specifications. Our investigations not only characterize the performance of the antennas in planar shape, but also under defined bending conditions that resemble those of a worn garment. We show that the antennas can withstand clothing bends down to a radius of 37.5 mm without violating specifications

/pdf/design-and-characterization-of-purely-textile-patch-antennas-2nanw0dxzs.pdf

Design and Characterization of Purely Textile Patch Antennas

Environmental conditions significantly affect the conservation state of the cultural heritage artefacts. Temperature and relative humidity are directly related to the degradation of multimateric artefacts both stored in indoor sites and exposed to outdoor conditions. Furthermore, the presence of aggressive gases in the atmosphere can have harmful effects on the long-lasting preservation of cultural heritage assets. Therefore, an effective and flexible environmental monitoring system is often required in order to assess if the environmental conditions are suitable for the proper conservation of the artefacts or if some specific action has to be taken for their safeguard. However, several constraints are involved in the design and deployment of environmental monitoring systems to be installed in cultural heritage sites, such as reliability of the system and data quality, operative life, real-time operation, maintenance cost, sensor size and communication range. The proposed monitoring system has been specifically developed for the cultural heritage field trying to achieve a good trade-off among all of these constraints. Nevertheless, its characteristics and flexibility make it suitable for many other applications. The proposed system has been employed in several monitoring campaigns in Italy and abroad. As an example of its application, data acquired during a campaign held in Colombia, are reported in the paper.

Environmental monitoring in the cultural heritage field

This paper describes development and characterization of thin film thermocouples to be used as a non-perturbating solution to follow the freeze-drying process of pharmaceutical chemicals. Pharmaceutical chemicals are routinely produced by means of freeze-dryers with excellent results, however the drying process is slow requiring days to complete and this increases the product cost. To optimize the process, reducing the drying time, this must be carried out close to the maximum allowed temperature. A monitoring system able to continuously monitor the product temperature during the drying could greatly reduce the damage risk, but actual sensors are too invasive to permit a reliable measurement and radiation remote systems cannot be used. This paper describes the results obtained by developing thermocouples with sub-micrometric thickness which can be embedded into the vial walls without significatively altering the wall thickness and properties. Prototypes of the proposed thermocouples have been realized and successfully tested.

Sputtered thermocouple for lyophilization monitoring

This paper describes a simple and cheap solution specifically designed for monitoring the degradation of thin coatings employed for metal protection. The proposed solution employs a commercial photo camera and a frequency-domain-based approach that is capable of highlighting the surface uniformity changes due to initial corrosion. Even though the proposed solution is specifically designed to monitor the long-time performance of protective coatings employed for the restoration of silver artifacts, it can be successfully used also for assessing the conservation state of other ancient metallic works of art. The proposed solution is made tolerant to exposure changes by using a procedure for sensor nonlinearity identification and correction, does not require a precise lighting control, and employs only free open-source software, so that its overall cost is very low and can be used also by not specifically trained operators.

Exposure-Tolerant Imaging Solution for Cultural Heritage Monitoring

This paper describes a sensor network architecture developed for museum monitoring. The proposed solution is based on a distributed environment composed of small, nearly invisible measuring nodes that wireless connect to Arduino-based WiFi routers to reach a distributed cloud. Users can connect to the measuring system by using their smart-phones and can receive alerts and measurements in real-time. The entire architecture is based on the available μPanel environment and can be deployed and adapted to the actual conditions in a timely and easy manner. The application described in this paper makes reference to the museum environment, but can seamlessly adapted to several other situations.

Wireless sensor network architecture for remote non-invasive museum monitoring

This paper presents a framework for the development of a distributed sensor network which has been designed to fulfill the requirements of the European Union project on Advanced Distributed Architecture for Telemonitoring Services (ADA). The proposed architecture relies on the Jini/spl trade/ functionality and implements a plug & play feature so that new sensors are readily made available to the users.

Marco Parvis

Papers

Environmental monitoring in the cultural heritage field

Sputtered thermocouple for lyophilization monitoring

Exposure-Tolerant Imaging Solution for Cultural Heritage Monitoring

Wireless sensor network architecture for remote non-invasive museum monitoring

A distributed sensor network based on Jini/spl trade/ technology