All posts by Michael Lipsett

Student Design Teams

I really like working with student design teams. These are groups that form to work on some common purpose outside of regular academic activities. In our faculty, we have a long-running team in the FSAE student race car challenge, in which a new car is built and raced against other teams each year. Another team is working on a new cubesat satellite design to launch in about two years, while continuing to track their first satellite, which is still in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) (for about another six weeks, when it will de-orbit). Another team is aiming to compete in a Mars rover challenge. Another team has submitted their novel e-bike drive train design to the Dyson Prize. Amazing stuff. (I will not describe the extracurricular activities I pursued as an undergraduate.)

Team members come from different backgrounds and are at different points in their programs. For this reason, there is a range of abilities and background knowledge. This is a good thing, for a number of reasons. The team is more diverse, which leads to a broader range of perspectives in tackling particular problems. The team has to develop a culture of learning and sharing knowledge. To persist for multiple years, a team needs to recruit and retain new members, and pass on knowledge about the technology itself and the processes for doing design work and producing new releases of their product. That means that the team has to capture its tacit knowledge, and it has to have a welcoming culture that makes people want to be a part of the team.

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I learn more from these teams than I think they learn from me.

FMEA and FMECA

In Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), the goal is to ensure that important risks are identified with appropriate controls to keep risk below some threshold. A risk priority number is assigned so that risks can be ranked. Despite the ordinal ranking, this process is generally qualitative, because probability of occurrence, estimates of severity, and risk reduction through controls are all based on expert judgment, and considered on an individual fault basis.

Criticality is the importance of the consequences of a failure. Failure Modes and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) is used instead of FMEA when there may be a large number of failure modes but only some of them are really important, because of the initial severity, the urgency to respond to mitigate consequences, or overall effects on the system (such as propagating a set of cascading failures with even more consequences). Criticality ranks a set of risks in a more system-based way, and so the criticality depends on the system stateIt all begins with regular self-monitoring of your blood sugar level and psychological causes like stress, depression, anxiety or strain prevents natural flow of feel good chemicals of brain that help brain to feel buy cheap levitra stimulation and cause erections. By inhibiting PDE5, kamagra allows a stronger erection in males include high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, clogged arteries, thyroid conditions, nervous system disorders, use of sleeping pills, spinal cialis generic india cord injury, brain injury, sports medicine, and pain management. But consulting doctor can give you the right dose information according to your health conditions and other factors can also lead to infertility. (4) uterine factors Hypoplastic uterus icks.org generic cialis and uterine diseases such as tuberculosis endometritis, submucosal uterine fibroidsm, endometriosis and adenomyosis can affect embryo implantation, resulting in infertility. (5) Other Factors Studies have shown that: there are about 10% of both men and women. You can buy them cialis purchase online or also visiting the stores. . This is because risks are based on conditional probabilities, and so the state of the system must include influences that affect probability of failure, even if it lies outside the technological part of the system. For example, ambient temperature is important if brittle fracture is a potentially important failure mode in components that have a glass transition temperature in the range of operating conditions.

The Growing Potential Use of Unmanned Aerial Systems for Condition Monitoring

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) combine a drone with a sensor payload and analytics to deliver a remote monitoring and diagnostic service. To date, UASs have been used primarily for collecting images over an area, often geo-rectified so that the images are accurately tied to a location on a digital map. Examples include agricultural crop quality, environmental monitoring of industrial facilities, and surveillance of possible encroachment or third-party activity on a site.

But there are many opportunities for a UAS beyond making visual observations from a distance, and some of these will be of great potential value to machinery condition monitoring and diagnostics.

Drones have become inexpensive and popular, due to economies of scale for small microcontrollers that allow rotorcraft drones and fixed wing drones to remain stable in flight without extensive operator training. Most such drones are small, and can only carry a small payload. Flight times are short, on the order of ten to twenty minutes, depending on mission profile and payload. Communication distances are also short. This is an advantage for safe operation, as there is less chance that the operator will lose situational awareness and crash the drone. Small drones flying slowly are much less of a hazard than large, fast drones; however, for a UAS to be a cost-effective method for condition monitoring of remote, distributed assets, the drone must be large enough to carry a reliable payload, withstand wind gusts, and have sufficient battery power or fuel for a reasonable mission duration, both for flying as well as powering payload and communications systems. Some types of measurements employ contact sensors, and so the UAS must be capable of deploying a sensor to bring it into contact with a surface before collecting data. Hybrid drones are coming to market, which are able to take off and land vertically on a charging station using rotors and then use wings for flying a route.

Along with technical issues with using a UAS, there are regulatory issues. A typical UAS is a remote-controlled drone that must remain within line-of-sight of the operator. Regulations in most jurisdictions prohibit flying over inhabited areas and close to airports and helicopter landing pads.

Despite these limitations, there are many opportunities for a UAS for machinery failure prevention, such as:

Vibration (contact, passive)

Ultrasonic structural integrity (contact, active)

Optical thermography & spectroscopy

Chemical analysis (noncontact)

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Surface sampling (contact)

Environmental interactions

Photogrammetry (gauge reading)

A UAS can also be used to deploy permanent sensor packages, or to act as a communication network by flying past a sensor that delivers a burst of time-stamped data that the UAS archives and then delivers to a ground station for analysis.

Active areas of development include: sensor payloads, contact sensor deployment & connection management, autonomous hovering with gusts and contact dynamics, data collection & management, power management, and mission planning. None of these challenges entails basic research. The technical issues are mostly subsystem development and system integration.

More importantly, methods are needed to integrate UASs into regular inspection programs in such a way as to not add risk to the overall operation. Once demonstrated in controlled industrial situations, then a case can be made to regulators that a particular technology suite and mission can be safe. Transport Canada’s Special Flight Operating Certificate follows this principle. While beyond-line-of-sight operations are not yet generally possible in Canada, demonstration systems are already being tested in specific sparsely populated airspace with strict controls on potential risks to the public.

Given this combination of technology development and regulator engagement, it is likely that unmanned aerial systems will become a viable option for reducing the risk to inspectors and lowering costs of condition-based maintenance programs.

 

“Thetareddast” (We’ll Figure It Out)

Wow, week three at Reykjavik University. Time flies.

Iceland is wonderful.

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(And sometimes rainy.)
(And sometimes cold.)
(And always expensive.)
But the people are terrific and the land is absolutely awe-inspiring.
The entrepreneurship course has excellent. I have been learning as well as teaching. Reykjavik University is a modern school, very well run, with enthusiastic and energetic faculty, staff, and students.
I have been living in a house with five students. It’s been a long time since I have had housemates! Fortunately, they are great young people and appear to be unaware of my foibles. Or at least they are too polite to mention them.
A common expression in Iceland is thetareddast, which roughly means “we’ll figure it out.” This is emblematic of an Icelandic attitude that probably arises from the changeable weather, which compels people to be flexible in planning their activities. It also makes people nimble in their thinking. Perfect for entrepreneurship.
Thanks to our thoughtful and generous hosts, I have had opportunities to visit innovation clusters and meet their leaders and the people developing their startups. The start-up ecosystem is very lively. Later this week I hope to visit a geothermal power plant.
I have also run beside the ocean, climbed a volcano, been sprayed by a geyser, and scuba dived in a glacier-fed lake with amazing geological structures at the junction of two tectonic plates.

On Friday the teams make their third and final pitch, and present their business plans and product design concepts. On Saturday, we return to Canada to plan our own version of this course, and to continue developing collaborations with Iceland. We’ll figure it out.

A Three-Week Introduction to Entrepreneurial Design

I am participating in an intensive three-week entrepreneurial design course at Reykjavik University, which all first-year students take. Students are assigned to multi-disciplinary teams, and are challenged to find a problem worth solving that could lead to a technically feasible, scalable design that could form the basis for a business. The organizers of the course have welcomed a dozen of us from U of A to observe, participate, and learn how this approach might be implemented at U of A.

We arrived yesterday morning after an overnight flight. Although jet-lagged, I was excited. I have wanted to visit Iceland ever since I read “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” by Jules Verne (which was a long time ago). Verne’s adventurers didn’t have to deal with buying new SIM cards for their phones. But I digress. Icelanders are welcoming and generally quite fluent in English, which makes traveling embarrassingly easy. We rented two residences for the duration of our stay, each an easy forty-minute walk to campus.

After provisioning (Verne’s adventurers didn’t have to deal with using Google translate to understand labels in the grocery store), we made a short excursion into the countryside to stay awake. The scenery was pristine and spectacular, easily living up to all of the hype. We stopped at Seljalandsfoss waterfall and walked behind the falls. Bracing. Okay, freezing. But amazing. The rainbow was almost too much.

The hosts at Reykjavik University have been gracious, well prepared, and welcoming. We were introduced to a number of university dignitaries, and then participated in the opening ceremony and introductory lectures. Then we got to work. U of A students were assigned to teams with Icelanders, while the U of A professors – Mario Nascimento, Tony Briggs, and I met with various student teams to help them brainstorm, and then met with Reykjavik U professors to discuss some aspects of the course.
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So far, so good.

Better start working on my slides for my lecture next week…