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In this work, an accurate, low-cost electronic angle-meter is designed, manufactured and metrologically characterized. The idea at the basis of the proposed electronic goniometer is to transduce the mechanical rotation into the variation of an electrical quantity, namely a resistance. Then, such a variation can be easily measured through a low-cost multimeter used as an ohmmeter. The metrological characterization of the prototype demonstrated that the proposed system can achieve an uncertainty as low as 1◦ with costs of an order of magnitude lower than devices currently available on the market. In practical applications, this device can be used for the metrological characterization of heading instrumentation thanks to an isolated rotating plate on which several devices can be placed.

An ultrasonic heading measurement method, working under magnetic interference prohibitive for magnetometers, was prototyped, validated, and metrologically characterized. Two capacitive ultrasonic transducers convert the mechanical rotation in two correspondingly time-delayed electrical sine waves. Then, the time delay is estimated using the standard tree parameter sine-fitting algorithm. The prototyped goniometer achieves the same repeatability level (

An on-chip transducer, for monitoring noninvasively the insulin bio-availability in real time after administration in clinical diabetology, is proposed. The bioavailability is assessed as insulin decrease in situ after administration by means of local impedance measurement. Inter-and-intra individual reproducibility is enhanced by a personalized model, specific for the subject, identified and validated during each insulin administration. Such a real-time noninvasive bioavailability measurement allows to increase the accuracy of insulin bolus administration, by attenuating drawbacks of glycemic swings significantly. In the first part of this paper, the concept, the architecture, and the operation of the transducer, as well as details about its prototype, are illustrated. Then, the metrological characterization and validation are reported in laboratory, in vitro on eggplants, ex vivo on pig abdominal non-perfused muscle, and in vivo on a human subject, using injection as a reference subcutaneous delivery of insulin. Results of significant intra-individual reproducibility in vitro and ex vivo point out noteworthy scenarios for assessing insulin bioavailability in clinical diabetology.

A fault detection method exploiting Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is proposed for fluid machinery without adequate a priori information about faulty conditions. The method is trained only on data acquired during normal machine operation. For anomaly detection, typical quantities measured in monitoring fluid machines, namely 3-axis acceleration, electric power consumption, temperature, inlet and outlet pressure, are monitored. Principal Component Analysis is exploited for features extraction. Then, data is clustered and an HMM is trained. Finally, the trained model is employed together with a goodness-of-fit test to detect faulty states by processing online data. The method was tested and validated at CERN on screw compressors for cryogenic cooling.

A calibration method exploiting a single external reference is proposed for sensors arrays in presence of a measurand non-linear gradient in the system under test. The calibration artifacts due to a non-uniform distribution of the measurand in the system under test, not detected by the single punctual reference sensor, are avoided. A proof-of-principle demonstration is carried out within the case study of a thermistors array obtaining compatible result with respect to a standard method which requires a reference sensor for each element of the sensor array. Thus, the complexity (and cost) of standard calbration setups is reduced by using a single reference sensor without sacrifying significantly the calibration accuracy.

An experimental procedure for measuring the drug absorbed by a biological tissue in laboratory emulation of dermatological topical treatments is proposed. Laboratory emulation is based on the analysis of the eggplant electrical reaction to the injection of drug. Eggplant and human tissue are both well modeled by a distributed circuit model described by the ColeCole empirical equation. An exploratory measurement campaign aimed at investigating the relationship between the injected drug amount and the measured impedance is reported. The basic ideas, the measurement system design, and the proposed measurement procedure are illustrated. Then, its feasibility is proved experimentally and the results of the metrological characterization are reported and discussed. Results point out that, by a “simple” measurement of the impedance module (and not a spectroscopy), the amount of injected drug can be assessed by acceptable uncertainty.

A fair automatic test equipment in which the control operations can be performed by remote units is presented. The proposed solution is based on web services and provides the user with a simple interface for connecting to remote resources. Moreover, it implements an original ultra-light communication protocol. The proposed solution can be attractive both from an industrial and a didactical point of view.