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The field of industrial electronics has evolved profoundly during recent decades, hand in hand with smart systems, enabling the development of new functionalities. It is now common for robots to perform many previously burdensome tasks and operate in collaboration with humans. Miniaturized sensors, which are capable of extracting industrial process data with high levels of accuracy and robustness, are fully integrated to increment efficiency. Motion control systems have enabled the adaptation of systems to harsh industrial conditions, and all data related to sensing, operation, and control are interconnected using communication networks. Fault diagnosis strategies provide feasible control actions when abnormalities are detected. These are just a few examples that illustrate a revolution that has enabled the incorporation of smart systems into industrial processes. This article discusses how the incorporation of these capabilities has been made possible, and it examines the future challenges to further advances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a highly integrable pressurized thermo-pneumatic microvalve for impulsion and handling of fluids in portable SU-8 microfluidic platforms is reported. The microvalve aims to overcome the dependence on external pressure sources for actuation in this kind of platforms by incorporating a pressurized chamber in the design. The microvalve consists of two modules. The first one is a pressurized SU-8 chamber which makes the microvalve portable and is used to store pneumatic energy, and the second one is a gold wire inserted in a thin SU-8 wall to make a thermo-pneumatic and single-use actuation. The gold wire heats the thin wall up, and the pneumatic energy stored in the chamber exerts pressure on the wall simultaneously. The wall breaks due to the combination of these effects, releasing the pressure stored in the chamber, and creating an unidirectional flow in an output channel. The microvalve has been fabricated and tested in the laboratory showing an activation time of 1 s and a required energy of 188 mJ, values which fit the theoretical model. The advantages of this microvalve as a microfluidic component lie in its independence of external pressure sources, its high integrability with electronics and microfluidics in the same substrate [printed circuit board(PCB)], and the low consumption with respect to other PCB/SU-8 microvalves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some industrial applications, an accurate estimation of a light source position is needed. That is the case for a heliostat, a device that projects sunlight onto a focus hundreds of meters away from its aiming point. In this paper, we present a novel sensor design for generating an alignment error signal. Included is a detailed study of its response, which shows that certain geometrical design parameters are necessary to achieve desired accuracy. This sensor has been implemented using micro- electromechanical system techniques to achieve a robust structure at low cost and it has been successfully applied to sun-tracking systems. Experimental results obtained in field tests are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Use of advanced communication technologies, highly integrated control, and programming platforms drastically increases the performance of industrial control systems. That is the case of Motronic, where the synergistic collaboration between industry and academia has led to an advanced distributed network control system. To be commercially successful, it needs to have a low cost and to be robust, even if this requirement implies that it is a custom design and not based on previously existing commercial solutions. Use of standards and off-the-shelf products lower development costs, but usually raise production costs. In this paper, we show that, in certain applications, design of a new system from scratch is more advantageous. This system comprises a set of dynamically reconfigurable local controller nodes, a graphical programming environment, a remote supervision and control system, and a fault-tolerant fiber optical network. TCP/IP connectivity is provided by the use of a local gateway. Motronic is currently being applied in the integrated control of large production plants and in energy and power management industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]