Radar technology for harsh environments

Due to the adverse environmental conditions in metal production, essential measurement technologies, e.g. optical and laser-based, reach their physical limits in various fields of application and many common sensors (optical, laser-based) are hindered from reaching their specified functionality. Thus, observation of relevant process parameters stays fragmented over the whole process-chain.

Radar-based measurements however are insensitive to the adverse conditions (e.g. high temperature, dust, air humidity, and mist from rolling emulsion or oil).

For improving the technological readiness level of such sensors, a well-structured and competently performed experiments and functionality tests are of core importance.

Robustification of Asinco’s radar-based measurement technology

In a comparison of today’s optically- or laser-based measuring systems, a previously unattained field of application, much closer to the process, has been opened.

The radar-based system technology, further developed and especially robustified for the industrial application, has the potential to be used in almost every process stage of metal processing, from continuous casting (slabs) and hot rolling (hot strip, heavy plate) to cold rolling and finishing, as well as in long product plants and potentially in the production of other materials such as plastics, glass, wood and paper.

By transferring main raw data processing onto a decentralised embedded system included in the sensor, core requirements are provided for effectively implementing the sensing units as self-aware CPS in industrial environments. Due to advancement in innovative signal processing algorithms, this was achieved without any discernible disadvantages compared to existing measurement technologies.

With the introduction of this new measuring technology, possibilities for process improvement with associated energy savings are attained at many points in the metal production process.

Cost-effective, modular and reproducible solution

The project yielded an overall concept based on STM32-componetns and a test plan for a self-sufficient test-hardware.

This resulted in a first prototypical test batch of sensors which have been tested under various conditions:

• Testing and improving sensor performance in terms of real-time capabilities for digital signal processing (sampling time: up to 1 kHz)
• Testing and improving sensor protection (housing) against harsh environment conditions with long-term continuous load tests against corrosive gases
• Testing and improving sensor protection (electronic) against harsh environment conditions with long-term continuous load tests with temperatures up to 100°C and variable humidity.

Based on these tests, further adaptions of the sensors have been carried out and the final iteration showed that the design of the sensor housing can withstand the industrial conditions in the steel industry.

A test set-up will be placed in a real environment in a steel mill to carry out tests under real conditions in order to validate the sensors. Nevertheless, the prospects for a functional radar system that can prove itself under harsh industrial conditions are good.

FED4SAE support and opportunity

The increasing use of sensor intelligence and data pre-processing capabilities has been successfully facilitated in the project by using the reliable and high-performance industrialized STM hardware.

The initiation and further pursuit of the robustification and market readiness development of radar-based sensors is the main interest for ASINCO as systems currently available on the market obviously do not meet industrial requirements.

The simulation of real process environments by exploiting the functionalities of the advanced platforms of the Fraunhofer corrosive gases testbed accelerated the improvement of the technological readiness level of the radar sensors.

ASINCO is already closely interconnected within the pan-European community of radar sensors and within the steel producing community. The cross-border collaborations in FED4SAE further enhanced this and helped ASINCO to expand its leading position in the target market of providing robust measurement solutions for the metal producing industry.

Heavy rain alarm systems

Rapid flooding of drainage systems is a well-known but hard to predict consequence of heavy rain that occurs in many climates around the world, yet there are hardly any possibilities for planning offices and municipal civil engineering departments to evaluate how their sewer system works. Furthermore, there are not yet any comprehensive early warning systems on the market to warn of the dangers.

The resulting high flow rate and pressure in the duct system can lead to considerable damage to the substance or even worse to detached manhole covers which pose a danger to pedestrians and traffic participants and can lead to Injuries and even fatal accidents. The tremendous suction of the backflowing water during heavy rain events also can pose serious danger.

Solution

Sentinum’s holistic sensor system allows to generate an accurate picture of the events in the canal and damage to infrastructure and people can be prevented. By recording the water level, flow rate and pressure, conclusions can be drawn in real time about events in the drainage system. The positions of manhole covers are instantly detected and warnings are transmitted to the relevant authorities, by voice call, SMS or e-mail.

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Additional, data is continuously recorded over many years and processed to provide information about changes and anomalies. This opens up a completely new perspective on the planning phase, implementation and, above all, maintenance of the sewer systems.

Smart manhole monitoring

Together with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Systems and Component Technology IISB as a cascade funding partner, ST Microelectronics as a platform partner and Spekter GmbH as the first pilot customer, a wireless system is being created to monitor the status of sewage systems.
The overarching overall system consisting of wireless sensors, cloud infrastructure and an intuitive web application is intended to warn municipalities of the hard-to-predict consequences of heavy rain in sewers and protect citizens from the dangers that arise.

• The sensor is completely energy self-sufficient and wireless.
• The communication uses the latest LPWAN technologies.
• All data is stored by SENTINUM cloud services and visualized for the customers.
• SENTINUM holistic sensor system allows to generate an accurate picture of the events in the canal and damage to infrastructure and people can be prevented. By recording the water level, flow rate and pressure, conclusions can be drawn in real time about events in the drainage system.
• SENTINUM sensor also records the position of the manhole cover and the presence of harmful gases such as H2S to protect people in the vicinity.

The products will be available after the certification phase is completed early 2021.

FED4SAE support and opportunity

In Sentinal, the Sentinum flood protection product range has been expanded. In the implementation of the product, Sentinum benefited especially from the support provided by the partners via FED4SAE.
The STM32 platform offers a reliable and high-performance hardware basis for Sentinum sensors. In addition to the MCUs, Sentinum also relied on other electronic components from ST Microelectronics in order to meet the high quality standards for their products.
The firmware was developed using the tools available from ST and also Sentinum’s specially developed operating system Sentos, a platform-independent applicationoriented framework, for embedded software development.
These housings and specified adhesive for sealing and mounting of the sensor units were tested under corrosive atmosphere in the testbed at Fraunhofer IISB to simulate the harmful atmosphere under realistic conditions. Being able to fall back on such practical tests during product development accelerates time-to-market extremely and increases the quality of our final product.
In addition to the technical expertise, business expertise has been provided, especially on the place in the value chain when the IoT product is launched on the market and efficient design-to-cost strategies. With the constructive suggestions, Sentinum were able to sharpen their profile again and hope to be able to set new impulses with an innovative product in the future.

References

www.sentinum.de

www.spekter.de

Dermoscopy refers to the examination of the skin using surface microscopy. Althexis Solutions Ltd™ has developed the Next Generation Hyperspectral Dermoscopy System which enables dermatologists to gain insights into the presence of cancerous cell tissue (melanoma) in a patient’s skin and boost their productivity through an user-friendly, touch enabled software.

The handheld camera solution has been achieved as a result of exploiting advances in Artificial intelligence with hyperspectral imaging which when tuned to specific wavelengths enables early-stage detection of signals as to the presence of cancerous cell tissue.

As with most, if not all cancers, early detection enables early intervention and treatment resulting in a significant increase in recovery and survival rates [1]. Hyperspectral imaging provides these early signals of melanoma to be detected in advance of them becoming visible to the human eye and this innovation provides a significant competitive advantage over existing RGB image solutions on the global market.

Product Development

The Althexis™ team has developed a full end to end system solution targeting dermatologists clinics providing them with an integrated system that allows them to capture all aspects of patient engagement capturing patient details, electronic patient GDPR consent form through to imaging data capture, classification, diagnosis, treatment if appropriate and any follow up visits thus enabling additional images to be captured and the morphology of the mole traced over time.

Through the application of smart filtering algorithms, hair on the patients’ skin can be detected and removed from the image enabling an unobstructed high resolution view of the skin mole.

The SpectroX camera device illuminating a patient’s arm and the high resolution hyperspectral image (specific hyperspectral bands and RGB) of the mole is captured and presented in the system, see below pictures.. The data is stored in a secure encrypted Cloud platform enabling easy access to the data.

Overcoming the many challenges

Training Artificial intelligence systems generally require large quantities of labelled data and in this case Althexis needed hyperspectral images of melanoma data which just did not exist and so the team prioritized the creation of the hyperspectral camera and getting out to dermatologists to enable them to assist in generating this valuable labelled dataset which Althexis integrated into their existing RGB based Neural Network inference models.

The Althexis team worked with CSEM who provided their deep expertise in hyperspectral imaging and developed a customized hyperspectral Camera Dermoscope which was very successful both in terms of actual performance and durability. The camera worked continuously for large periods of time without any operational issue. The quality of the image was highly appreciated by the Doctors and they also provided feedback that camera housing materials give a feel of a premium medical device.

Collaborating with dermatologists to evaluate and gain their feedback on early prototypes enabled the team to gain valuable insights which were used to fine tune both the handheld camera and the system’s graphical user interface thus improving the overall usability of the solution. Other insights as to decontaminate the camera between patients, feedback on image resolution and field of view, consistent lighting to ensure image quality were raised and addressed enabling a more compelling market ready solution to be created.

FED4SAE support and opportunity

FED4SAE provided an excellent opportunity for Althexis to work with CSEM who provided both coaching support, expertise in Hyperspectral imaging and developed the custom Hyperspectral Camera which met the specific needs of Althexis’s digital dermoscopy use case.

Althexis evaluated the use of Movidius VPU as an accelerator to offload image classification however they concluded that the performance of an Intel iCore 10 CPU Tablet PC, including AVX-512 DLBoost instructions to accelerate AI inference, provided sufficient compute power without the need for an additional accelerators to do the image classification.

Intel offered to help scale the solution as part of its portfolio of healthcare market solutions and to showcase the solution at its global partner marketing events.

Blumorpho provided business innovation coaching and monitoring.