This paper deals with a development and lab testing of energy harvesting technology for autonomous sensing in railway applications. Moving trains are subjected to high levels of vibrations and rail deformations that could be converted via energy harvesting into useful electricity. Modern maintenance solutions of a rail trackside typically consist of a large number of integrated sensing systems, which greatly benefit from autonomous source of energy. Although the amount of energy provided by conventional energy harvesting devices is usually only around several milliwatts, it is sufficient as a source of electrical power for low power sensing devices. The main aim of this paper is to design and test a kinetic electromagnetic energy harvesting system that could use energy from a passing train to deliver sufficient electrical power for sensing nodes. Measured mechanical vibrations of regional and express trains were used in laboratory testing of the developed energy harvesting device with an integrated resistive load and wireless transmission system, and based on these tests the proposed technology shows a high potential for railway applications.

In most brushless direct current (BLDC) motor drives, there are three hall sensors as a position reference. This paper presents a method that allows the operation of a BLDC motor with one faulty hall sensor. The situations considered are when the output from a hall sensor stays continuously at low or high levels, or a short-time pulse appears on a hall sensor signal. For fault detection, identification of a faulty signal and generating a substitute signal, this method only needs the information from the hall sensors. So this method can be added as a standalone subsystem to existing drives. The paper provides many simulations on how the presented method reacts for various types of faults. An experimental evaluation is provided too. Due to the demand to operate at a high speed, the method is implemented into the FPGA.

Using Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) or extended Power-Hardware-In-the-Loop (PHIL) tools is crucial in rapid prototyping of electronic devices used in automotive or aerospace applications. Flexible tool for Electronic-Control-Units (ECU) testing enables user to test control algorithms during development or ECU quality check in manufacturing process. This paper is concentrated on design of cost-effective PHIL device, which will replace real DC motor component in the ECU testing chain. To obtain high quality substitute of the real DC motor it is necessary to create Real-Time model, which simulates characteristic behaviour of the real DC motor, like a motor/generator mode, friction modelling, current ripple caused by commutator, etc. Function is demonstrated on a fuel pump module where real DC motor is replaced with the PHIL Real-Time simulator.