Development of an automated assessment technology for detecting damage in body armour

Hard ballistic body armour plates are designed to withstand the impact of a bullet and protect the wearer, if this happens the armour is clearly damaged and so is retired from service. Mishandling, however, such as dropping the armour, may cause minor and difficult to detect damage which compromises the effectiveness of the plate. Current methods of inspection involve shipping the plates to a central location, performing a thorough inspection and returning them to service if uncompromised; this is costly and requires redundancy of equipment for when not in service. Acousto-Ultrasonics is a method of structural health monitoring in which ultrasonic waves are excited in a structure by a transducer and receivers record the response, any deviation from a baseline measurement give an indication of damage within the structure. Within this paper the development and testing of a novel handheld prototype device is presented, which gives a simple yes/no answer to if there is damage on the plate. This inspection is quick and easy to perform by unskilled personnel. Low profile sensors have been utilised combined with a novel flexible circuitry with built in memory, which does not compromise the effectiveness of the armour.

Intelligent Systems as Tools for Measuring Residential Energy Consumption

The implementation of intelligent systems in homes for measuring energy consumption are possibilities that owe their viability to the IoT (Internet of Things and investments in R&D). Becoming fundamental for this change in the way of thinking and using electric power in households, buildings and especially in industry 4.0. The present work demonstrates an experiment focused on a residence for the analysis of energy consumption measurement, with the use of a nano arduino plate, current and voltage sensors, internet connection and use of the MQTT protocol making the integration in the Blynk platform. Obtaining as results voltage approximately 224V, electric current close to 3.89A, 356 points of samples for measurement of consumption and 255 points for preparation of graphs. Minimums for voltage and current 207.75V and 0.62A respectively and maximums 233.22V and 25.31A. A standard deviation of 5.54 for voltage and 3.33 for current. Analyses performed by Blynk, from estimates by mathematical modeling, considered by means of tests and it was observed that the behavior of current and voltage signals are close to the realities of energy distributors.