A Novel Bike-Mounted Sensing Device with Cloud Connectivity for Dynamic Air-Quality Monitoring by Urban Cyclists

Torque Measurement and Control for Electric-Assisted Bike Considering Different External Load Conditions

This paper proposes a novel torque measurement and control technique for cycling-assisted electric bikes (E-bikes) considering various external load conditions. For assisted E-bikes, the electromagnetic torque from the permanent magnet (PM) motor can be controlled to reduce the pedaling torque generated by the human rider. However, the overall cycling torque is affected by external loads, including the cyclist's weight, wind resistance, rolling resistance, and the road slope. With knowledge of these external loads, the motor torque can be adaptively controlled for these riding conditions. In this paper, key E-bike riding parameters are analyzed to find a suitable assisted motor torque. Four different motor torque control methods are proposed to improve the E-bike's dynamic response with minimal variation in acceleration. It is concluded that the wheel acceleration is important to determine the E-bike's synergetic torque performance. A comprehensive E-bike simulation environment is developed with MATLAB/Simulink to evaluate these adaptive torque control methods. In this paper, an integrated E-bike sensor hardware system is built to verify the proposed adaptive torque control.

Design of Gas Monitoring Terminal Based on Quadrotor UAV

The problem of air pollution is an increasingly serious worldwide. Therefore, in order to better monitor the gas components in the atmosphere, the design of a gas monitoring terminal based on a quadrotor UAV, including software and hardware design, is hereby carried out. Besides, a pump-suction series cavity is designed to reduce the influence of airflow disturbance on the UAV, which is verified to possess a certain anti-interference ability through Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) simulation experiments. In addition, a linear regression algorithm is used for sensor calibration and a polynomial piecewise regression method is used for temperature compensation. The experimental results show that the R2 of the model reaches 0.9981, the fitting degree is rather high, and the output is closer to the real gas concentration value after calibration. At the same time, the temperature compensation parameters are determined, which considerably improves the accuracy of the entire hardware terminal. Finally, the vehicle exhaust monitoring experiment is conducted, and the experimental results show that this scheme can successfully detect the exhaust position of the vehicle exhaust under the interference of the downwash flow of the UAV, thereby proving the reliability and accuracy of the monitoring terminal.

Portable Electronic Nose Based on Digital and Analog Chemical Sensors for 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole Discrimination

2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) is mainly responsible for cork taint in wine, which causes significant economic losses; therefore, the wine and cork industries demand an immediate, economic, noninvasive and on-the-spot solution. In this work, we present a novel prototype of an electronic nose (e-nose) using an array of digital and analog metal-oxide gas sensors with a total of 31 signals, capable of detecting TCA, and classifying cork samples with low TCA concentrations (≤15.1 ng/L). The results show that the device responds to low concentrations of TCA in laboratory conditions. It also differentiates among the inner and outer layers of cork bark (81.5% success) and distinguishes among six different samples of granulated cork (83.3% success). Finally, the device can predict the concentration of a new sample within a ±10% error margin.