Search Results (6)

The McKibben muscle types are pneumatic actuators known to be intrinsically safe for their high power-to-weight ratio. For these reasons, they are suitable for robotic, biomechanical, and medical applications. In these application fields and, above all, in collaborative robotics, where safety must be ensured for human–robot interactions, the values of pressure, force, and length are necessary and must be continuously monitored and controlled. Force and pressure transducers are commercially available to be integrated into a McKibben muscle type. On the contrary, no commercial-length transducers can be adopted. This work presents a novel McKibben muscle prototype with an embedded capacitive-length transducer. The latter is a cylindrical capacitor made of a telescopic system composed of two tubes: one of its ends is connected to the muscle. A change in the length of the muscle causes a proportional change in the transducer capacitance. The paper reports in detail on the working principle of McKibben’s muscle, its fabrication, characterization, and validation of four prototype capacitive transducers. The results achieved from the experimental activities demonstrate that it is possible to control the variations of the muscle length relative to its elongation and compression for values less than 1 mm. This is the consequence of the ability to measure the transducer capacitance with a typical statistical relative indetermination better than 0.25%, which is a figure of merit for the reliability and mechanical and electrical stability of the proposed McKibben muscle prototype. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that the transducer capacitance as a function of the muscle length is linear, with maximum deviations from linearity equal to 2.44% and 5.22% during the muscle elongation and compression, respectively. Full article

Brass is a material that can be used for a wide range of products, e.g., door fittings and handles, products from the electrical sector, installation technology from the sanitary sector, hydraulics, and pneumatic components. For Germany and northern Italy, where many of the above- mentioned products are manufactured, the processing volume is estimated at approx. 500,000–600,000 tons of brass per year. These products are often manufactured by means of forging and subsequently machined. The cross-industry use of extruded wrought zinc alloys in forming technology as a substitute for commercially available brass materials has a high CO2 emission saving potential of up to 40%. In this paper, a basic investigation of the forming of wrought zinc alloys is carried out and compared with brass and aluminum. In detail, the formability and the upset ratio are determined. In addition, the information obtained at laboratory level is verified by exemplary production selected parts on the industry level. Full article

Energy saving is one of the main technique routes for net zero carbon emissions. Air compressor systems take up a large part of energy consumption in the industrial field. A pre-cooling air compressor system was proposed for energy saving by cooling the air before it flows in a compressor. The energy efficiency of the proposed system was analyzed. As additional energy consumption is required for air cooling, the feasibility of the pre-cooling method for energy saving was analyzed. As the efficiency of the pre-cooling air compressor system is mainly influenced by the environment temperature and humidity, applicability of the system in different regions and at different seasons was discussed. A pilot project was performed to verify the technical feasibility and economics of the proposed system. When the precooling temperature of the pilot system was set to 2 °C, the annual pneumatic-electrical ratio of the system can be increased by approximately 2% in several regions of China. This paper shows the pre-cooling air compressor system is feasible for energy saving. Full article

Artificial intelligence techniques for pneumatic robot manipulators have become of deep interest in industrial applications, such as non-high voltage environments, clean operations, and high power-to-weight ratio tasks. The principal advantages of this type of actuator are the implementation of clean energies, low cost, and easy maintenance. The disadvantages of working with pneumatic actuators are that they have non-linear characteristics. This paper proposes an intelligent controller embedded in a programmable logic device to minimize the non-linearities of the air behavior into a 3-degrees-of-freedom robot with pneumatic actuators. In this case, the device is suitable due to several electric valves, direct current motors signals, automatic controllers, and several neural networks. For every degree of freedom, three neurons adjust the gains for each controller. The learning process is constantly tuning the gain value to reach the minimum of the mean square error. Results plot a more appropriate behavior for a transitive time when the neurons work with the automatic controllers with a minimum mean error of $\pm 1.2$ mm. Full article

Simulators have been traditionally used for centuries during medical gestures training. Nowadays, mechatronic technologies have opened the way to more evolved solutions enabling objective assessment and dedicated pedagogic scenarios. Trainees can now practice in virtual environments representing various kind of patient and body parts including physio-pathologies issues. Gestures, to be mastered, vary according to each medical specialty (e.g., ultrasound probe orientations, or forceps installation during assisted delivery). Hence, medical students need kinesthetic feedback in order to significantly improve their learning capabilities. Gesture simulators require haptic devices with variable stiffness actuators. Existing solutions do not always fit the requirements because of their significant size. Contrary to electric actuators, pneumatic technology is low-cost, available off-the-shelf and offers a better mass–power ratio. However, it presents two main drawbacks: nonlinear dynamics and need for a compressed air supply. During the last decade, we have developed several haptic solutions based on pneumatic actuation (e.g., birth simulator, epidural needle insertion simulator) and, recently, in a joint venture with Prisme laboratory, a pneumatic probe master device for remote ultrasonography. This paper recalls literature scientific approaches on pneumatic actuation developed in the medical context and illustrated with the aforementioned applications to highlight the benefits. Full article

To identify and diagnose the latent leakage faults of key pneumatic units in the Chinese standard Electric Multiple Units (EMU) braking system, a multi-source information fusion method based on Kalman filtering, sequential probability ratio test (SPRT), and support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. The relay valve is taken as an example for research. Firstly, Kalman’s state estimation function is used to obtain the innovation sequence, and the innovation sequence is input into the SPRT model to help recognize latent leakage faults of the relay valve. Using this method, the problem of the incomplete training set of the traditional SPRT method due to the change of the braking level and the vehicle load is solved. Secondly, the eight time-domain parameters of the relay valve input and the output pressure signal are extracted as fault characteristics, and then input to the support vector machine to realize the internal and external leakage fault diagnosis of the relay valve, which provides a reference for maintenance. Finally, this method is verified by the fault simulation data by quickly identifying latent leakage faults and diagnosing the internal and external leakage at a fault recognition rate of 100% by SVM under small sample conditions. Full article