Analysis and development of interface components and procedures for the design and commissioning toolchains in automation systems

The objective of the thesis project, developed within the Line Control & Software Engineering team of G.D company, is to analyze and identify the appropriate tool to automate the HW configuration process using Beckhoff technologies by importing data from an ECAD tool. This would save a great deal of time, since the I/O topology created as part of the electrical planning is presently imported manually in the related SW project of the machine. Moreover, a manual import is more error-prone because of human mistake than an automatic configuration tool. First, an introduction about TwinCAT 3, EtherCAT and Automation Interface is provided; then, it is analyzed the official Beckhoff tool, XCAD Interface, and the requirements on the electrical planning to use it: the interface is realized by means of the AutomationML format. Finally, due to some limitations observed, the design and implementation of a company internal tool is performed. Tests and validation of the tool are performed on a sample production line of the company.

Cure Induced Residual Stresses on Thick Composite Components Manufactured by Additive Process

This study investigates the effect of an additive process in manufacturing of thick composites. Airstone 780 E epoxy resin and 785H Hardener system is used in the analysis since it is widely used wind turbine blade, namely thick components. As a fiber, fabric by SAERTEX (812 g/m2) with a 0-90 degrees layup direction is used. Temperature overshoot is a major issue during the manufacturing of thick composites. A high temperature overshoot leads to an increase in residual stresses. These residual stresses are causing warping, delamination, dimensional instability, and undesired distortion of composite structures. A coupled thermo-mechanical model capable of predicting cure induced residual stresses have been built using the commercial FE software Abaqus®. The possibility of building thick composite components by means of adding a finite number of sub-laminates has been investigated. The results have been compared against components manufactured following a standard route. The influence of pre-curing of the sub-laminates has also been addressed and results compared with standard practice. As a result of the study, it is found that introducing additive process can prevent temperature overshoot to occur and benefits the residual stresses generation during the curing process. However, the process time required increases by 50%, therefore increasing the manufacturing costs. An optimized cure cycle is required to minimize process time and cure induced defects simultaneously.

Introducing CHIMeRA: from the development of a comprehensive biomedical database to the analysis of its sub-components.

In this thesis we discuss the expansion of an existing project, called CHIMeRA, which is a comprehensive biomedical network, and the analysis of its sub-components by using graph theory. We describe how it is structured internally, what are the existing databases from which it retrieves information and what machine learning techniques are used in order to produce new knowledge. We also introduce a new technique for graph exploration that is aimed to speed-up the network cover time under the condition that the analyzed graph is stellar; if this condition is satisfied, the improvement in the performance compared to the conventional exploration technique is extremely appealing. We show that the stellar structure is highly recurrent for sub-networks in CHIMeRA generated by queries, which made this technique even more interesting. Finally, we describe the convenience in using the CHIMeRA network for research purposes and what it could become in a very near future.