Giuseppe Fiscelli

Integration of distributed on site control actions via combined photovoltaic and solar panels system

A systematic evaluation of the potential energy saving and CO2 emissions reduction on buildings was carried out, when a renewable energy system is locally installed. The exploitation of a combined solar and photovoltaic system and the integration of suitable energy management actions were deeply investigated. A model of these solar and photovoltaic components has been developed and included within a complete house simulator, capable to precisely figure out the daily electric energy consumptions of typical apartments and to measure the positive actions induced by the added renewable energy. Saving up to 40% on the energy consumptions and even more savings on wiring losses seems to be easily obtainable.

An FPGA-Based Software Defined Radio Platform for the 2.4GHz ISM Band

A prototype of a software defined radio (SDR) platform has been successfully designed and tested implementing a reconfigurable IEEE 802.11 and ZigBee receiver. The system exploits the reconfiguration capability of an FPGA for implementing a number of receiver configurations that share the same RF front-end. Configurations can be switched at run time, or can share the available logic and radio resource

A low power and high resolution data logger for submarine seismic monitoring

The design, implementation and characterization of a digital waveform recorder for ocean bottom seismic monitoring is here reported. The system is capable of synchronously acquiring, and logging on a flash memory bank, four high resolution signals. Thanks to a very careful design of the system architecture and by using robust digital signal processing techniques, two main conflicting issues have been addressed: a high dynamic range, better than 120dB, usually obtained with high energy demanding converters, and a power consumption as low as 250mW, hence allowing to easily increase the time of a continuous submarine monitoring session up to 3months.

A novel partial discharge detection system based on wireless technology

A novel Partial Discharge detection system is here described. The system employs a special wideband antenna as a sensor, allowing to sense either Partial Discharges pulses either the AC supply voltage at a distance from the component under test, so avoiding the need of direct connection or component shutdown. Thanks to its wireless nature and small physical dimensions, the system enables to perform accurate on-line Partial Discharge diagnosis even in circumstances where conventional instrumentation would be impractical to use, so greatly extending the applicability of this diagnostic method.

An embedded datalogger with a fast acquisition rate for in-vehicle testing and monitoring

A very compact and high performance datalogger for automotive in-vehicle testing is here described. The small logger dimensions and the availability of a CAN interface allows to easily implement multiple and distributed acquisition schemes, very challenging with traditional instrumentation. High acquisition rate, up to 100 Ksps/ch, and low cost was obtained through a very accurate hardware and software design.

Wide bandwidth impedance meter using low rate random sampling

A novel impedance measurement method based on random sampling of voltage and current signals is proposed. This technique dramatically reduces the sampling frequency requirements, thus circumventing the limitations imposed by maximum speed of the analog to digital converter and the signal processing unit. The lowering of the sampling frequencies allows the design and the implementation of an almost all digital architecture by using a simple microprocessor based embedded system and a digital frequency synthesizer. The basic principles are presented, and the implemented algorithms are described. Experimental results show the instrument performances compared to others commercial alternatives.