Radhi Mhiri

Lab@home for analog electronic circuit laboratory

Laboratory activities of analog electronic circuit undergraduate course at École de technologie supérieure (ETS) require the physical presence of students in groups of 2 in the laboratory to complete predefined or project based laboratories. This classical or traditional approach continuously requires big investments on laboratory equipment and significant space requirements. Moreover, it obliges students to be physically present in the laboratory to complete their experiments. The lab instructor is also present to help them with their needs or to answer their specific questions related to the experiments. With the evolution of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and electronic circuit board technologies, further possibilities even include to bring the laboratory at home (Lab@home). This philosophy can be achieved with the advantages of miniaturized and low cost equipment and facilities, complemented with the students already available personal computers. Available miniature kits include basic electronics for the generation and processing of various types of signals. The personal computer coupled with the kit, acts as a set of signal injecting and measuring devices. Pedagogical strategies to encourage team collaborative work, ensuring simultaneous information exchanges between the students themselves and with the laboratory instructor can be elaborated specifically for this innovative setup. This recent approach can be used to help enforce the knowledge and competence of the students, allowing them to develop their autonomy, their creativity and thus develop their ability to innovate. This paper presents and further details the Lab@home approach, with its impacts on the students, the Professor, the lab instructor and on the academic institution more globally. The necessary resources, common challenges and difficulties, advantages and drawbacks of the approach, and recommendations for its implementation are also included. A Lab@home implementation case study is also presented at the end of this paper.

The experience of a collaborative project on remote laboratory: From development to operation

Distance Learning has seen in the last twenty years a remarkable growth through ICT developments. This evolution has rarely involved training based laboratory work. The concept of Online laboratory or Lab At Distance (LAD) has timidly accompanied this trend. Today, with the development of digital equipment and the increased performances of Internet communication, the LAD found an interesting tool in training systems.

Robust control of a manufacturing system: Flow-quality approach

This paper seeks to establish within a formal framework for modeling the robust control laws of manufacturing systems to temporal and non-temporal constraints. The goal is to conclude the type from the production system robustness. A methodology of robust control construction generating the margins of passive and active robustness is elaborated. The redundancy of the robustness of the elementary parameters between passive and active is used. Indeed, local models are developed; each of them modeling resource robustness. Then, a synchronized assembly of these models enabled us to constitute our final model. The Intervals Constrained Petri Nets (ICPN) tool is used. To this goal, a whole of definitions, lemmas and theorems are committed and affirmed per applicable examples.

Cooling performance and energy saving of a refrigeration cavity supported by an outside cold air flow controlled by a PID controller

This paper aims to prove the efficiency of using the free, abundant cold air flow stemming from the outside in high altitude to enhance the cooling inside a refrigeration cavity and to reduce the energy consumption. The cold air flow is spread out inside a cavity covering the side wall of the appliance and, which is connected to the inlet and outlet conducts. For that purpose, a Simulink model is proposed to model this installation. The internal temperature is computed according to the evaporator temperature and the outside cold air flow, which is also computed according to the outside temperature. The simulation results show that when the internal temperature is higher than the desired one and the outside temperature is low enough, the use of the controlled cold air flow as a second cooling source allowed to speed-up the cooling inside the refrigeration cavity of about 36.21 % and to reach an energy saving of about 36.23% compared with the classical thermostatic control. When the internal temperature drops below the desired one, the appliance did not consume any energy.

Implementation of Laboratory At Distance (LAD): Specific considerations and recommendations

The laboratory of a course is considered as a fundamental part of the education and training for engineers and scientists. Remote laboratories are increasingly finding their way into a variety of disciplines. Development and operation of remote laboratory work are specific process in several dimensions (technological, pedagogical, organizational, etc.). We present in this article some typical characteristics of this process. We will limit ourselves to consider the specificities related to communication between the remote user and the laboratory equipment. We will consider also the problems related to planning and access control and we will highlight aspects related to safety and the initialization of the state of a bench for a new experiment starting at distance.