Low latency requirements are expected to increase with 5G telecommunications driving data and compute to EDGE data centers located in cities near to end users. This article presents a testbed for such data centers that has been built at RISE ICE Datacenter in northern Sweden in order to perform full stack experiments on load balancing, cooling, micro-grid interactions and the use of renewable energy sources. This system is described with details on both hardware components and software implementations used for data collection and control. A use case for off-grid operation is presented to demonstrate how the test lab can be used for experiments on edge data center design, control and autonomous operation.

A physical thermodynamic model of a detached house connected to a low-tempered district heating network is presented. The model is created in Mathworks Simulink@ with a pedagogic approach in mind, e.g. masked subsystems divided in to physical components. The house model is easily modified to any detached house. Provision is also made to make it scalable to multi-family houses. The district heating substation modeled is a parallel coupled plate heat exchanger, which is the most common substation in smaller buildings such as villas. The purpose of creating the model was to provide a platform for test and evaluation of new control methods for district heating system based on wireless sensor networks. Initial validation of the model is presented.

Hardwired sensor installations using proprietary protocols found in today’s district heating substations limit the potential usability of the sensors in and around the substations. If sensor resources can be shared and re-used in a variety of applications, the cost of sensors and installation can be reduced, and their functionality and operability can be increased. In this paper, we present a new concept of district heating substation control and monitoring, where a service oriented architecture (SOA) is deployed in a wireless sensor network (WSN), which is integrated with the substation. IP-networking is exclusively used from sensor to server; hence, no middleware is needed for Internet integration. Further, by enabling thousands of sensors with SOA capabilities, a System of Systems approach can be applied. The results of this paper show that it is possible to utilize SOA solutions with heavily resource-constrained embedded devices in contexts where the real-time constrains are limited, such as in a district heating substation.

This paper proposes a passive Barkhausen noise sensor design suitable for low power applications. The sensor uses a permanent magnet and the relative motion between itself and a measured specimen instead of the conventional method that uses a fixed sensor and an alternating magnetic field. Since this novel design is passive, the sensor is well suited for low power applications and could potentially be used in e.g. A condition monitoring system integrated into a rolling element bearing. Proof of concept testing has been performed showing that the proposed sensor produces similar results as conventional Barkhausen noise sensors when applied to specimens being cyclically loaded until failure in a rotating bending rig. The results imply that material fatigue detection using the Barkhausen noise can be performed with the proposed sensor at a fraction of the energy cost compared to a conventional sensor. This warrants future research into the development of the proposed sensor, its advantages, disadvantages, and functionalityValiderad; 2016; Nivå 1; 2016-10-11 (andbra)