Volume 78, Issue 10 -

Fluidic soft-actuators inherent compliance combined with their low weightmakes them suited for a safe interaction with humans. For the determination of the torque characteristics of new rotary actuators an automated test setup was developed measuring the resulting torque in dependence of the applied pressure and the actuator′s angle.

With diamond tools it is possible to achieve high surface qualities with one process step. To produce complex mouldings with a reduced amount of chipping runs new tools with free-form cutting edges will be used. However, this requires a high accuracy of the diamond tools which must be tested consequently and very precisely in real process time. The concept of the used measurement technique for the free-form diamond tools and the simulated results of a set-actual comparison of a cutting edge are presented.

Micro-Opto-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MOEMS) become widely accepted in sensor technology. In this context planar emitter-receiverdevices with silicon photodiodes vertical emitting laser, and integrated micro-optics to measure the concentration of particles in fluids are presented. Two different variations of the sensor, with and without micro-optics to shape the primary light, are compared. The arrangements with integrated micro-optics achieve a clearly increased sensitivity. This is demonstrated by experiments.

In this article the characteristics of optical topography measuring systems are analyzed by a chirp calibration standard. With the aid of this standard it should be possible to characterize the instrument transfer behaviour of surface measuring devices. In this special case a white light interference microscope and a confocal microscope are compared. The measurement results show differences which can be used for the characterization of optical surface measuring devices with respect to their applicability for technical surfaces.

Traditional methods to demonstrate the required reliability use test data of the technical system under consideration. In industrial application this is not possible, since running an appropriate number of tests is too costly. Therefore it seems obvious to incorporate other sources of information in the analyses. For this purpose approaches from Bayesian Statistics are adequate which allow the combination of test data and prior knowledge like an expert′s experience on similar systems. This paper presents some approaches which can efficiently be implemented into industrial application. Especially methods for combining knowledge from different sources are introduced.

Gas emissions are crucial in many hazardous scenarios and can be threatening for persons close-by. The examination of such scenarios without endangering people was objective of a research project. Development and validation of a remote-controlled gas concentration measurement using a microdrone were carried out.