Arc faults are serious discharges, damaging insulation systems, and triggering electrical fires. This is a transversal topic, affecting from residential to aeronautic applications. Current commercial aircrafts are being progressively equipped with arc fault protections. With the development of MEAs, future airliners will require more electrical power to enhance fuel economy, save weight, and reduce emissions. The ultimate goal of MEAs is electrical propulsion, where fault management devices will have a leading role, because aircraft safety is of utmost importance. Therefore, current fault management devices must evolve to fulfill the safety requirements of electrical propelled aircrafts. To deal with increased electrical power generation, the distribution voltage must be raised, thus leading to new electrical fault types, in particular arc tracking and series arcing, which are further promoted by the harsh environments typical of aircraft systems, i.e., low pressure, extreme humidity, and a wide range of temperatures. Therefore, the development of specific electrical protections which are able to protect against these fault types is a must. This article reviews the state-of-the-art of electrical protections for aeronautic applications, identifying the current status and progress, their drawbacks and limitations, the future challenges, and research needs to fulfill the future requirements of MEAs, with a special emphasis on series arc faults due to arc tracking, because of the difficulty in detecting such low-energy faults in the early stage and the importance and harmful effects of tracking activity in cabling insulation systems. This technological and scientific review is based on a deep analysis of research and conference papers, official reports, white papers, and international regulations.

Industrial process modelling represents a key factor to allow the future generation of industrial manufacturing plants. In this regard, accurate models of critical signals need to be designed in order to forecast process deviations. In this work a novel multimodal forecasting methodology based on adaptive dynamics packaging and codification of the process operation is proposed. First, a target signal is decomposed by means of the Empirical Mode Decomposition in order to identify the characteristics intrinsic mode functions. Second, such dynamics are packaged depending on their significance and modelling complexity. Third, the operating condition of the considered process, reflected by available auxiliary signals, is codified by means of a Self-Organizing Map and presented to the modelling structure. The forecasting structure is supported by a set of ensemble ANFIS based models, each one focused on a different set of signal dynamics. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed method is validated experimentally with industrial data from a copper rod manufacturing plant and performance comparison with classical approaches. The proposed method improves performance and generalization versus classical single model approaches.

A common denominator in the vast majority of processes in the food industry is refrigeration. Such systems guarantee the quality and the requisites of the final product at the expense of high amounts of energy. In this regard, the new Industry 4.0 framework provides the required data to develop new data-based methodologies to reduce such energy expenditure concern. Focusing in this issue, this paper proposes a data-driven methodology which improves the efficiency of the refrigeration systems acting on the load side. The solution approaches the problem with a novel load management methodology that considers the estimation of the individual load consumption and the necessary robustness to be applicable in highly variable industrial environments. Thus, the refrigeration system efficiency can be enhanced while maintaining the product in the desired conditions. The experimental results of the methodology demonstrate the ability to reduce the electrical consumption of the compressors by 17% as well as a 77% reduction in the operation time of two compressors working in parallel, a fact that enlarges the machines life. Furthermore, these promising savings are obtained without compromising the temperature requirements of each load.

This paper presents a condition-based monitoring methodology based on novelty detection applied to industrial machinery. The proposed approach includes both the classical classification of multiple a priori known scenarios, and the innovative detection capability of new operating modes not previously available. The development of condition-based monitoring methodologies considering the isolation capabilities of unexpected scenarios represents, nowadays, a trending topic able to answer the demanding requirements of the future industrial processes monitoring systems. First, the method is based on the temporal segmentation of the available physical magnitudes, and the estimation of a set of time-based statistical features. Then, a double feature reduction stage based on principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis is applied in order to optimize the classification and novelty detection performances. The posterior combination of a feed-forward neural network and one-class support vector machine allows the proper interpretation of known and unknown operating conditions. The effectiveness of this novel condition monitoring scheme has been verified by experimental results obtained from an automotive industry machine.

This paper proposes and evaluates the behavior of a new health indicator to estimate the capacity fade of lithium-ion batteries and their state of health (SOH). This health indicator is advantageous because it does not require the acquisition of data from full charge–discharge cycles, since it is calculated within a narrow SOC interval where the voltage vs. SOC relationship is very linear and that is within the usual transit range for most practical charge and discharge cycles. As a result, only a small fraction of the data points of a full charge–discharge cycle are required, reducing storage and computational resources while providing accurate results. Finally, by using the battery model defined by the Nernst equation, the behavior of future charge–discharge cycles can be accurately predicted, as shown by the results presented in this paper. The proposed approach requires the application of appropriate signal processing techniques, from discrete wavelet filtering to prediction methods based on linear fitting and autoregressive integrated moving average algorithms.

Vibration monitoring plays a key role in the industrial machinery reliability since it allows enhancing the performance of the machinery under supervision through the detection of failure modes. Thus, vibration monitoring schemes that give information regarding future condition, that is, prognosis approaches, are of growing interest for the scientific and industrial communities. This work proposes a vibration signal prognosis methodology, applied to a rotating electromechanical system and its associated kinematic chain. The method combines the adaptability of neurofuzzy modeling with a signal decomposition strategy to model the patterns of the vibrations signal under different fault scenarios. The model tuning is performed by means of Genetic Algorithms along with a correlation based interval selection procedure. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed method are validated experimentally with an electromechanical test bench containing a kinematic chain. The results of the study indicate the suitability of the method for vibration forecasting in complex electromechanical systems and their associated kinematic chains.