Giovanni D’Addio, Luigi Iuppariello, Maria Romano, Paolo Bifulco, Nicola Pappone, Bernardo Lanzillo, Mario Cesarelli
Effects of Regent Suit on Lower Limb Electromyographic Patterns of hemiparetic subjects

During human walking, the muscle activity of the lower extremities needs to be well coordinated to provide support, dynamic balance, propulsion, and foot clearance. Clinical aspects of patients who are hemiplegic as a result of stroke vary according to the damaged region of brain tissue, its size, and the cause of damage. Functional recovery of limb mobility of patients with spinal or cerebral injuries can take great advantage of the basic role played by sensorial and proprioceptive stimulations. On this base the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences have recently developed the “Regent Suit” (RS), an experimental medical device derived from a suit worn by astronauts for therapeutical purposes during space flights. Although preliminary studies describe rehabilitation outcome of the RS in stroke, EMG changes induced by the suit are not known. Aim of the paper is to describe the effects of RS on lower limb EMG patterns on hemiparetic subjects.

Marcantonio Catelani, Lorenzo Ciani, Alberto Reatti
Critical components test and reliability issues for Photovoltaic Inverter

Reliability requirements are very interesting aspects for plant based on PV panel. In fact these plants are planned to operate for many years. One of the most critical subsystem in the PV plants is represented by the inverter. The analysis of its critical components is a very important task that can be obtained by means a well-designed test plan. This approach allows to improve complex system maintenance policies and, at the same time, to achieve a reduction of unexpected failure occurrences in the system during its functioning in the field.

Marco Faifer, Massimo Lazzaroni, Sergio Toscani
Dust effects on the PV plant efficiency: A new monitoring strategy

As well known dust deposition on PV panels results in a decrease of the electrical power produced by the panel/photovoltaic system. In order to assess this decrease and carry out a long-term economic analysis, it is desirable to make an accurate prediction of the efficiency of the system and of the maintenance costs. Starting from this assumption, an economic model that takes into account the relationship between the losses in the energy production and the cost of maintenance is very useful. In this paper the losses due to the dust will be evaluated considering radiation data provided by public meteorological stations installed which are few kilometers far from the considered PV system.

Cheng Huang, Guojiao Wang, Weiguang Yang
A Fast Maximum Likelihood Estimation for High-Resolution ADC Test

With the increasing resolution of analog to digital converter (ADC), the percentage of the test cost in the overall chip cost is improving gradually. Therefore, faster and more accurate test methods are required urgently for the high-resolution ADC nowadays. Compared with the least squares(LS) method, the maximum likelihood(ML) estimation method can extract more information from output codes, and estimators of measured parameters are consistent and asymptotically efficient. Due to the ADC resolution is increasing, the number of transition levels raise exponentially which causes huge test parameters space. The traditional ML estimation method can’t tackle the situation of the highresolution ADC. This paper focuses on the problems of how to reduce the computation complexity and implement high-resolution ADC test with ML estimation method. The main finding is that the proposed method reduced test time in comparison of the traditional ML method. And it makes the ML estimation method use in high-resolution ADC test.

Maurizio Caciotta, Fabio Leccese, Giuseppe Schirripa Spagnolo, Lorenzo Cozzella
Automatic Industrial Electrical Circuit Firing Prevention using Infrared Termography

An important problem in industrial system, both working in low and medium power, is the possibility that some circuits have a current dispersion, with a subsequent increasing in local temperature. This situation, if not immediately corrected, can produce, in some cases, firing accidents, with a great amount of money loss and long period of out-of-order systems. Although procedures based on Infrared Thermography to analyze and find critical situations already exist, these are always based on long manual procedures and usually are used for analysis of complex industrial systems. In this paper, after a short review of the common manual thermograph investigation, an automatic system based on two infrared thermograph cameras and an image processing real time analysis is proposed. The device demonstrates the possibility to take under control some critical systems and preventing firing accident in automatic way. This solution can be easily integrated in a SCADA architecture for monitoring and alerting the supervisor about over-temperature or current dissipation cases.