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| Feeling the Earth Move
| People have been trying to predict earthquakes for centuries—using animal behavior, weather, and seismic monitoring—but have had less than stellar success. As the human population shifts from a mostly rural existence to a mostly urban one, earthquakes exact a higher price, both in property damage and in lives lost. | | | Sensing with Autonomous Mobile Robots
| | Autonomous mobile robots rely on sensors to navigate through their environment. | | | Keeping Cool
| | If you've ever worked while resting a laptop computer on your lap, you know that computers emit heat, and the more powerful the computer, the greater the heat produced. This is a problem because electronics really don't enjoy elevated temperatures. A hot computer is a slow computer or, worse, a computer that will cease functioning. | | | Advances in Freeze Protection: Low-Temperature Cut-Outs for Unit Ventilators
| | In HVAC systems, the humble freezestat and the newer solid-state combination sensor both prevent freeze-related damage to ventilation system coils. Here's how the two technologies stack up against each other. | | | The Big Picture: Sensor Webs in Disaster Response Demo
| | In an increasingly wired world, knitting together data from disparate sources into an interoperable whole can present disaster managers and first responders with critical information during a major emergency or crisis. | | | Jennic Claims First Large-Scale ZigBee Network Evaluation Tool
| | New 100-node ZigBee evaluation product enables deployment of large-scale real-world building monitoring applications. | | | Wireless's Domestic Turf War
| | Three major wireless communications protocol rivals have made new moves in home automation , while energy-harvesting pioneer pursues its own path to the building market. | | | Who Goes There?
| | These jumpy times call for ever more building security, and that includes access through revolving doors. The ceiling-mounted BlackHawk system uses active IR and triangulation distance measuring to detect unauthorized entry or exit in a door quadrant. | | | NJ Newspaper Busts Ghost
| | New Jersey's Asbury Park Press reports that the ghost of Bruno Hauptmann, convicted of kidnapping and killing the toddler son of Charles Lindbergh, is rumored to be turning on lights at the Hunterdon County Courthouse, where he was tried in 1935. But county architect Frank Bell points out that overly sensitive IR sensors, recently installed to control lights, are being triggered when the climate-control system causes air currents to shift. (http://tinyurl.com/ljr3x) | |  MORE ARTICLES
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| 3D Image Correlation: Measuring Displacement and Surface Strain
| | 3D image correlation is a general-purpose strain measurement tool that allows us to measure 3D displacement and the true surface strains of any material without contact and without many of the difficulties associated with these measurements. | | | NDT Without Magnets
| | Southwest Research Institute engineers have developed multilayer thin films and combined them with magnetostrictive sensors to nondestructively detect and monitor defects in aircraft components. | | | Contracts Improve Maintenance, Sight, and Security
| | The Land Forces Group, Acquisition Div., of MTC Technologies has won task orders to help U.S. Marine Corps engineers and managers integrate sensors on light armored vehicles to collect real-time data that will streamline maintenance. (http://tinyurl.com/qbqgn) Another contract aims to improve the capabilities of vehicle drivers: The U.S. Army has contracted DRS Technologies to produce Driver Vision Enhancers (DVEs) for a wide range of frontline combat and tactical wheeled vehicles. The DVEs use DRS's low-power uncooled infrared (LPUIR) detector, thermally compensated optics, and an 800 3 600 pixel active matrix LCD panel to let drivers see clearly at increased distances—regardless of light level, adverse weather conditions, and obscurants such as smoke and dust. (http://tinyurl.com/legg3) | | | Steps Toward High-Precision Torque Measurement
| | Rising fuel prices, coupled with tightening regulations on vehicle efficiency and emissions, are creating a global demand for higher levels of precision in torque measurement on test stands for engines and transmissions. On one hand, torque values must be certifiable to meet regulations and manufacturers' specs. On the other, they must be precise enough to pick up efficiency differences of 0.1% or less in the test object. Such tight system accuracy requirements mean that the torque flanges themselves must be accurate to within 0.05%. | | | Volcanoes vs. Jet Engines
| | At any given time, 20 volcanoes are erupting somewhere on the planet. Volcanic ash and jet engines do not mix well. This wouldn't normally be a problem, but on Unimak Island in Alaska there are six volcanoes, one of which, Shishaldin, has erupted at least 29 times since 1755. | | | Solving Tough Strain Gauge Problems
| | A load cell is just a strain gauge applied to a metal bar with known characteristics inside a pre-engineered package to measure a specific range of applied force. | | | Fingerprint Sensors and Algorithms Combined for Authentication
| | UPEK and Cogent Systems cooperate to provide solutions for
government and commercial access control and portable identity
management applications. | | | Look to the Birds
| | Oxford University zoologists Graham Taylor and Adrian Thomas have
outfitted an eagle with four miniature high-speed spy cameras and
other instruments in a 15 g pack to learn more about its aviational
secrets. An inertial measurement unit recorded details of the
bird's aerobatics and transmitted the data to a receiver on the
ground. | | | Funding Enables UAV Capabilities
| | According to Forecast International analyst Larry Dickerson, the market for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance systems, including air vehicles and payloads, is expected to be worth $13.6 billion through 2014. "Thanks to their battlefield successes in Iraq and Afghanistan, money is being lavished on UAV programs as never before," said Dickerson. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Asset Tracking in Industrial Settings—A Review of Wireless Technologies, Part 3
| | Most wireless technologies to be used for industrial asset tracking are nowhere near the point of offering plug-and-play operation. Before you decide to use a system based on RSSI, RuBee, or UWB in a RTLS, make sure you know what you're signing up for. | | | Asset Tracking in Industrial Settings—A Review of Wireless Technologies, Part 2
| | Real-time location systems require accuracy and reliability. Will RFID-, GPS-, or chirped frequency-based systems meet your minimum requirements? | | | Asset Tracking in Industrial Settings—A Review of Wireless Technologies, Part 1
| | Before you can come to grips with industrial real-time location systems, you must understand the environment in which they function and the communications that empower them. | | | Future Networks
| | The next generation of networks will move beyond disconnected device-specific networks and systems and toward a distributed infrastructure, with intelligent functions residing across the entire network, from its edge to its core. | | | Where RFID, Sensing, and RTLS Meet
| | New developments bring together RFID and sensors — and add location-identification capabilities.
| | | Sensors and Privacy
| | A survey of more than 700 IEEE Fellows, done by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in conjunction with the Institute for the Future, sought to learn what science and technology developments are most likely to take hold within the next 10 to 50 years. | | | Sensors Tag Assets
| | In the article, "IBM Software Tracks Computers, Trucks," c|netnews.com describes how IBM is planning to offer "unified management tools" capable of tracking IT gear and physical assets—such as trucks and shipping containers—with electronic sensors. | | | Tracking Cows
| | Beef is big business, more than $50 billion/year, in fact. So, it goes without saying that tracking cows is important, especially in the wake of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy a.k.a. mad cow disease) and other animal diseases. The USDA is developing the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) to identify and track individual animals, the aim being to allow the USDA to track a diseased animal back to its source, through every location it's been, within 48 hours. Under NAIS, a national database maintains animal ownership and location histories. | | | Sense and Respond Networks for Agile, Secure Distribution
| | Active RFID tags can store entire manifests and routing schedules as well as sensor data. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Just Add Parts and Shake . . .
| | This column usually focuses on prosaic and proven applications for circuits and sensors. This month, though, I am going to talk about an emerging field called evolvable hardware, which potentially has tremendous applicability to designing robust sensing and control systems. | | | The Ultimate Sensor
| | In the original Star Trek series, DeForest Kelley played ship's surgeon Dr. Leonard McCoy. This character was especially memorable for his frequent medical pronouncement, "He's dead, Jim," and for his handheld medical scanner, a device that looked like a pepper shaker with a spinning cap. This magical sensor could instantly and noninvasively diagnose any medical condition. | | | Synchrous Detection
| | Synchronous detction can be used to recover very small signals buried in lots of noise. | | | Signal Amplification
| | With the recent introduction of cheap ?? analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) offering resolutions of 24 bits or more, you'd think that the digital revolution is complete, and that the need for analog design has passed. Twenty-four bits gives you a resolution of better than 1 ?V on a 10 V span, so these high-resolution converters will make it easy to solve many interfacing problems with a minimum of additional circuitry. | | |
The Five-Minute Filter University—August Session
| | Last month we discussed a number of simple passive filters in both low-pass and high-pass configurations. Although these filters could reject out-of-band signals, this capability was relatively limited because they all had an attenuation roll-off rate of –20 dB/decade. You will find that many applications require a much greater ability to reject out-of-band signals than that provided by the passive low-pass filters we looked at. | | | The Five-Minute Filter University, July Session
| | Back in the late 1970s comedian Don Novello (a.k.a. Father Guido Sarducci) had a routine called the "Five-Minute University," which was supposed to impart to you, in the span of only five minutes, all the knowledge you would retain five years after graduating from a regular university. So, in the same spirit, I offer "Dr. Ed's Five-Minute Analog Filter Design University." | | | Your Helpful Guide to the Thermoelectric Cooler
| | In 1834 Jean Peltier discovered that running an electric current across a junction of two dissimilar metals caused heat to transfer across the junction, cooling one side while heating the other. Because of the low efficiency of this effect in metals, and their high thermal conductivity, which causes heat to rapidly leak back across the junction, this Peltier effect was little more than a laboratory curiosity. | | | Putting Your Data on the Right Bus
| | Lately I have been building, debugging, and using different data
acquisition (DAQ) systems for various purposes. In the course of
this work (especially the debugging!) I started wondering about
some of the "available options"—a code phrase for "How would
I have done this if I had known what kinds of problems I would be
in for with my present design?" | | | Sensors Control the World! Part 2
| | Instability, at least in simple linear systems, results from two
characteristics of the control loop. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Monitoring Temperature in a Geothermal Bridge
| | A Canadian bridge uses a novel technique to keep its roadbed clear of black ice. Designers testing the concept chose an Internet-enabled DA system to allow them to track the multiple temperatures and strains involved. | | | High-Tech Road Repair
| | In April 2007, a gasoline tanker crashed and burned while negotiating the MacArthur Maze, a network of interstate connections around the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge in California. The resulting blaze was so intense that it caused parts of the I-580 overpass to crash onto the interstate below. | | | When Bridges Move: GPS-Based Deflection Monitoring
| | The GPS-based system provides 3D coordinates with corresponding
time, making it possible to derive the frequency of structural
movements. | | | Meet the Road Monitor
| | New Hampshire's Department of Transportation, in conjunction with
Plymouth State University, is about to tackle a particularly thorny
problem: unpredictable road surface conditions. The Road Weather
Information System (RWIS) consists of multiple sensors and towers
that report local conditions to the DOT and other agencies. Let's
take a closer look. | | | Let's Clear the Air on Hazardous Location Requirements and Codes
| | This article presents both a brief explanation of hazardous location requirements and an attempt to unravel the codes used to identify them. It is not intended for engineers designing the actual electrical equipment, but rather for those who need enough basic information to properly interpret and specify the right electrical equipment for installation on their machinery. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Moving SOA onto the Plant Floor
| | If the sensor manufacturers' products already have the software "hooks" that allow the sensor data to be accessed by the SOA, the implementation has a quicker ROI. | | | Microsoft's Integration Environment—.NET
| | The .NET framework pools information from disparate systems to create a virtual synchronized and updated dataset, providing real-time visibility for decision-making. | | | How NetWeaver Drives Change
| | The software suite empowers managers and planners to build applications and processes that promote evolving company goals and enable innovation throughout the organization. | | | MES—A Work In Progress
| | Traditionally, a manufacturing execution system (MES) is defined as a production scheduling and tracking system, which schedules and updates orders, analyzes and reports resource availability, collects execution data—such as material and labor usage, process parameters, and order and equipment status—and maintains statistical quality control. But such a static definition doesn't do this genre of software justice because MESs are a work in progress. | | | OPC—A Question of Relevance
| | For ten years, OPC's suite of standards has provided the industrial automation world with open connectivity, but the technology on which its standards are based is no longer on the cutting edge of data sharing. The foundation that rescued manufacturers, systems integrators, and software providers from the chaos of proprietary communications interfaces now has to compete with fast movers such as service-oriented architectures and Web services. The question is: Can the standards evolve, embrace new communications mechanisms, and remain relevant? | | | Web Portals—A Personalized View of Data
| | Current information technology inundates you with more data than you can possibly use. To reap the benefits of information, you need some way to personalize or customize the way that data are selected and presented. Rather than having to do a lot of searching and sorting, you need a mechanism that will give you only data relevant to your interests. This is where the Web portal comes into play, bringing together information and applications within a Web browser in a way that meets the specific needs of the end user. | | | Composite Applications
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| Previously in this column, I've discussed software tools that are
invisible to the user, such as integration platforms and
service-oriented architectures (SOAs). These mechanisms function in
the background of information transactions and fall primarily
within the purview of the IT department. However, they contribute
individual technologies to (and are the support infrastructure of)
the software tool that is the user's first point of contact: the
composite application. | | | The Integration Platform?Tying Operations Together
| | An integration platform is a software backbone that enables the
free-flowing exchange of data and functionality among the multiple
applications that make up an integrated system. | | | Why Integration?
| | Integration isn't a passing fad; it's a practical necessity. It
builds on the interconnectivity begun by digital communications and
networking to deliver greater efficiency. | | | MORE ARTICLES
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| Improving Doppler-Based Sensing Systems
| | By incorporating high-performance digital signal controllers (DSCs), with their integrated architectures and small footprints, designers can simplify Doppler-based sensing systems, enhance their performance, and reduce development cycles. | | | Wet 'n Hairy
| | We're mammals and we shed. We know this, plumbers know this, and the technical operators at the Wet 'n Wild Water Park in Orlando, FL, definitely know this. | | |
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