Inspection Personnel Research Articles

Research and Design of LED Light Suppression Flicker Technology in Visible Light Communication Technology

“Lighting communication integration” is a key technology research for the future application of visible light communication(VLC). However, the bandwidth characteristics, dynamic modulation range and linear modulation performance of existing white LED still do not meet the requirements of high-speed communication. After adding the dimming function, the naked eye It is noticeable that flicker is felt. In order to solve the problem of LED flicker caused by high-speed communication, this paper proposes a “lighting and communication integration” technology scheme based on visible light communication(VLC), which studies from the aspects of suppressing flickering VLC scheme, LED communication dimming, and high-efficiency modulation driving circuit design. A PWM dimming control technology based on optical OFDM system is used for VLC and LED dimming scheme. Finally, the technology is applied to the typical application scenario of the power grid—cable tunnel, which realizes the two-way real-time voice communication of cable tunnel inspection personnel. And accurate positioning to ensure the personal safety of the inspectors and the safety of the grid production.

Multi-source partial discharge detection and rapid localization of switchgear based on comprehensive diagnosis method

Partial discharge detection is an effective method to find potential insulation defects in switchgear. At present, the switchgear is mainly composed of busbars, circuit breakers, grounding knives, cables and other components, which leads to multiple faults and simultaneous discharges in the partial discharge detection process of the switchgear. In order to realize the partial discharge detection and rapid location of the switchgear, based on the introduction of the detection methods and location principles of ultrasonic, transient ground voltage and UHF partial discharge, this paper proposes to use ultrasonic, transient ground voltage and UHF detection technology to diagnose and analyse the multi-source partial discharge of the switchgear and realize the detection of partial discharge; the multi-source partial discharge of the switchgear is realized by the rapid localization method combining the UHF time difference method and the flat surface method. Through partial discharge detection and localization analysis of a 35kV switchgear, the feasibility of multi-source partial discharge diagnosis and rapid localization method is verified, which provides a basis for on-site inspection personnel to realize multi-source partial discharge detection and localization of switchgear.

The Employment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Analyzing and Mitigating Disaster Risks in Industrial Sites

Effective safety procedures play a fundamental role in high-risk industrial contexts, because the occurrence of an accident can cause environmental catastrophes, severe damages to the structures, and fatal injuries to the workers. In particular, maintaining detailed and up-to-date information about potential accident areas is a crucial issue to prevent the occurrence of disasters and to safely plan the rescue process. In such contexts, periodic safety inspections are therefore performed on a regular basis, although they may expose the inspection personnel to harsh or hazardous environments. The employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in such situations can provide unprecedented opportunities for predisaster analyses and site management operations. According to the current regulations, however, industrial contexts are classified as “critical,” which substantially limits the possibilities of performing UAV operations in such places. The recent introduction of a simplified regulatory system for inoffensive UAVs has opened a wide landscape of new business opportunities. The article discusses the application of such technology for site analysis in industrial contexts, and illustrates the mandatory risk assessment procedure prescribed by the regulation. The results obtained show that although the technical advantages and economic convenience of employing this technology is generally recognized, at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, the market spread is still poor due to fragmented regulations, cultural barriers, and technical issues. In particular, the compliance with the ATEX directives still constitutes a significant technological problem substantially limiting the spread of innovative industrial services. Such issues are discussed in the article referring to a case study, in order to provide a reference guideline and to highlight the boundaries of application of innovative approaches to the prevention and management of industrial disasters based on UAV technology. In addition, the article identifies some important directives for further research and development of UAV systems capable to operate in high-risk industrial contexts, which constitutes an emerging business area with a vast potential market.

Математичні моделі верифікації ергатичних систем засобів залізничної автоматики

Issues related to the impact of operational, technical and inspection personnel on the safety of the use of ergatic railway automation systems have been addressed. In the conditions of interactive interaction of all types of personnel and equipment mathematical models for calculation of parameters of safety of use of such systems which consider their functioning in a regular and pre-auxiliary mode in various contexts of relations of human and technical factors are developed. It is established and proved that different modes of interactive interaction form a differentiated structure of calculation and logic schemes for assessing the safety of the use of ergatic control systems in railway transport. The functioning of ergatic control systems in railway transport has significant features associated with the inadmissibility of technological process downtime at infrastructure facilities. In this regard, in such systems there is an auxiliary control mode, in the framework of which blocking dependencies are completely or partially removed, which ensures the technological safety of the use of such systems. In recent years, a piecewise-defined character of mathematical models has been established on the basis of which a numerical safety assessment of the use of such control systems can be performed, which is due to the predominance of technical and human factors in different modes of functioning of such systems. At the same time, the development of forms of interactive interaction between different types of personnel in the active modes of operation of control systems requires a fundamentally new approach to safety assessment – taking into account the influence of differentiated human and integrated technical factors. In this regard, in this study, mathematical models are developed that allow you to take into account the interactive interaction of man and technology in the process of assessing the safety of the use of automated ergatic systems of railway automation. The graphical 3D dependencies built on their basis make it possible to carry out a predictive safety assessment of different systems in the process of their functioning during one working shift of operational, technical and audit personnel. In particular, the formation of mathematical models for calculating safety at different time intervals, which determine the auxiliary and standard operating modes of control systems, provides a differentiation of accounting for various factors when they dominate. An approach based on taking into account the influence of all types of personnel during their interaction with technology is reduced to considering different types of element connections in the calculation and logic schemes of the functional safety of systems, which reduces to different types of formulas in the final piecewise-defined expression for assessing the safety of using such systems.

Effective image models for inspecting profile flaws of car mirrors with applications

Since car mirrors are standard accessories with cars, the demand for car mirrors is growing and manufacturers also pay more emphasis on the increase of product quality. Common appearance flaws of car mirrors include: scratches, bubbles, pinholes causing surface fl aw type and burrs,damaged edges causing profile flaw type. Currently, the inspection tasks are conducted by human inspectors. Since the profile flaws will cause structural damages of car mirrors and reduce ability to withstand stress, the level of damage suffered even more than the surface flaws. In addition, the angle diversity of capturing images makes it hard to implement automatic optical inspection. Therefore, this study develops an automated profile flaw detection system for car mirrors to replace visual inspection personnel. This study proposes a self-contrast defect detection method for the profile flaw inspection of car mirrors. It is not required to provide a standard flawless sample in detection process and derive information compared with testing samples. The proposed method first extracts the contour information of the testing image by Fourier descriptors. Then, after some middle and high-frequency coefficients were filtered out, an approximated contour image can be rebuilt from the Fourier domain for comparing with the testing image. Finally, the fl aw districts are easily separated by image subtraction. Experimental results demonstrate that the fl aw inspection rate reaches 85.05%, and the incorrect alert rate is smaller than 0.07%, and the correct classification rate is up to 97.47%.

Development of intelligent system for automated traffic control

This article is devoted to the issue of regulating traffic congestion in major cities of the world using artificial neural networks. Research is aimed at developing import – substituting automated intelligent system that uses artificial neural network to make decisions to optimize traffic congestion by changing the duration of light phases of traffic lights. Multilayer perceptron with sigmoidal activation function is used as neural network. The article describes developing stages of intelligent automated traffic control system that using artificial neural networks allows making informed decisions based on extensive analysis of available information, as well as constantly adapt it to incoming external influences that lead to non – equilibrium state. Practical application of the proposed system is expressed in unloading road sections adjacent to highway; reducing the number of traffic jams in the lanes or reducing the length of the car queue; automating traffic control and reducing the number of emergency cases that require inspection personnel to leave for manual control. System allow improving overall traffic situation by avoiding cascading traffic jams on adjacent sections; prevention of accidents and conflicts between motorists and pedestrians; improving the reliability of adjustment and reducing cost of maintenance infrastructure.

Improvement on National Crisis and Emergency Management through a Core System: Lessons of the African Swine Fever Disaster

The purpose of this study is to seek the problem and improvement on the national crisis and emergency management system in Korea through the core system. Based on the lesson of the ASF disaster, this study analyzed the five major elements of the core system : value, institution, leadership, devotion, and expertise. This article suggests recommendations for improving the national crisis and emergency management in Korea as follows; (①value) promoting animal welfare certification policies to spread respect for life, following the method of killing with pre-trainingt, (②prevention) establishing a defense system with North Korea through international organizations, (③preparedness) unification of the crisis warning level in the manual and guidelines, and to raise the crisis warning level when ASF occurs in neighboring countries, (④response) promptly holding Animal Disease Control Council involving livestock farmers to seek expert advice and establish regulations on the extent of preventative killings. (⑤recovery) establishing compensation criteria, including the upper and lower limits for killing compensation, and supporting livelihood security funds before re-entry, (⑥leadership) change of national crisis management system to operate Central disaster and safety Countermeasure Headquarters in social disaster management agencies, (⑦devotion) strengthening disaster capacity of citizens and establishing a cooperative system among governments, corporations and civil society, (⑧expertise) modernization and specialization of livestock farms, expansion of inspection agencies and inspection personnel, expansion of vaccine research institutions and research personnel.

Views of veterinarians and meat inspectors concerning the practical application of visual meat inspection on domestic pigs in Finland

The post-mortem inspection of domestic pigs within the European Union was revised in 2014, primarily to include visual meat inspection of each carcase and offal. Palpations and incisions were removed from routine meat inspection procedures, as they are mostly used to detect pathological lesions caused by organisms irrelevant for public health, and instead can cause cross-contamination of carcases with foodborne pathogens. However, examination of all external surfaces of the carcase and organs, declaration of patho-physiological lesions as unfit for human consumption, and possibility for minimal handling of carcases and offals were held in place. In addition, the European Food Safety Authority suggested that palpation and incisions should be performed outside the slaughter line, but this was not incorporated in the revised legislation. We surveyed in 2014 the opinions of meat inspectors and veterinarians using an online questionnaire to determine what practical measures are required for the visual meat inspection procedure and when meat inspection staff consider additional palpations and incisions necessary. Based on the survey, turning the carcase and organs or technical arrangements such as mirrors were seen necessary to view all external surfaces. In addition, the pluck set cannot be trimmed on the side line. Local lesions, such as abscesses and lesions in the lymph nodes, signs of systemic infection and lymphoma, were the major lesions requiring additional post-mortem meat inspection procedures. Meat inspection personnel raised concerns on the poor quality of food chain information and export requirements demanding palpations and incisions. The efficient use of visual meat inspection requires legislation to better support the implementation and application of it, changes in the slaughter line layout and a possibility to classify incoming pig batches based on their risk.

Research on CBM of the Intelligent Substation SCADA System

An equipment status management and maintenance platform of an intelligent substation monitoring and control system is built in the Tai-Tam substation of the Taipower company. The real-time operating status of the equipment, such as the server, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) human–machine interface (HMI) software, switches, intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), merging units (MUs), as well as the entire SCADA system, are evaluated comprehensively. First, the status information of all equipment is collected, and the theory of relative deterioration degree (RDD) and fuzzy theory (FT) are applied to calculate the fuzzy evaluation matrix of the equipment influencing factors. Then, the subjective analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the objective entropy method for weighting are combined to calculate the comprehensive weights of the equipment influencing factors. Finally, the result of the equipment status evaluation is obtained using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) method and is presented at the equipment status management and maintenance platform. Such equipment status evaluation results can be used by the inspection and maintenance personnel to determine the priority for equipment maintenance and repair. The result of this study may serve as a valuable reference to utility companies when making maintenance plans.

Human reliability in non-destructive inspections of nuclear power plant components: modeling and analysis

Non-destructive inspection (NDI) is one of the key elements in ensuring quality of engineering systems and their safe use. This inspection is a very complex task, during which the inspectors have to rely on their sensory, perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills. It requires high vigilance once it is often carried out on large components, over a long period of time, and in hostile environments and restriction of workplace. A successful NDI requires careful planning, choice of appropriate NDI methods and inspection procedures, as well as qualified and trained inspection personnel. A failure of NDI to detect critical defects in safety-related components of nuclear power plants, for instance, may lead to catastrophic consequences for workers, public and environment. Therefore, ensuring that NDI is reliable and capable of detecting all critical defects is of utmost importance. Despite increased use of automation in NDI, human inspectors, and thus human factors, still play an important role in NDI reliability. Human reliability is the probability of humans conducting specific tasks with satisfactory performance. Many techniques are suitable for modeling and analyzing human reliability in NDI of nuclear power plant components, such as FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) and THERP (Technique for Human Error Rate Prediction). An example by using qualitative and quantitative assessesments with these two techniques to improve typical NDI of pipe segments of a core cooling system of a nuclear power plant, through acting on human factors issues, is presented.

Bolt loosening detection based on audio classification

As the most widely used coupling structure in electromechanical systems, bolt coupling is the important part in these systems. The reliability and strength of bolted joint are affected by pretension force, which is one of the most important factors to ensure the stability of bolt coupling. The inspection personnel hit the bolt with a hammer and judge the state of the bolt based on the sound. Although this method is very simple, the ability of the human ear to distinguish the knocking sound is poor, it can only distinguish the bolt with larger looseness. So a bolt loosening detection method based on audio classification is presented in this article. First, the hammering sound at different levels of bolt loosening was collected by smartphone. Then, the audio data were extracted to form a dataset. Finally, the support vector machine was used to train and test the dataset, and obtain the bolt loosening quantitative detection. A series of experiments were carried on to verify the accuracy and stability of this method. The results show that this method has high recognition accuracy and strong noise immunity. Therefore, this method can effectively reduce the occurrence of disasters.

Design and Application of Portable Fault Indicator Detector Based on Internet of Things

In order to solve the problem of detecting the fault indicator in the field, a design scheme of the portable fault indicator detector based on the Internet of Things is proposed. Firstly, the overall architecture of portable fault indicator detector based on Internet of Things is designed. Secondly, the system architecture of portable fault indicator detector is designed from two parts and seven aspects. Then, the hardware architecture of UPS power module, AC power amplifier module and human-computer interaction module is designed in detail. Finally, the main functions and detection methods of the portable fault indicator are discussed. The case analysis shows that the portable fault indicator detector based on the Internet of Things has greatly improved the time, manpower and cost of detection compared with traditional detection methods, and can conveniently meet the needs of on-site inspection personnel.

New psychoactive substances seized at the New Zealand border

ABSTRACTNew psychoactive substances (NPS) are an ever-evolving group of drugs, designed with slight modifications in chemical structure to evade detection and legislative controls while maintaining pharmacological activity. During the period 2014 to 2018, New Zealand border seizures of NPS submitted to a border screening laboratory identified 134 different NPS, and comprised 18% of all submissions to the laboratory. Some NPS had associated package labelling, which was determined to be accurate in 93% of samples, indicating that labelling may be useful to inspection and testing personnel when dealing with suspected NPS.

Real-Time Tunnel Crack Analysis System via Deep Learning

Cracks in the tunnel become an unavoidable problem in tunnel construction and tunnel using. Cracks will affect the stability of the tunnel and have a negative impact on the operation of the train. It is a crucial part of rail safety as well as rail defects and train defects. Therefore, cracks in the tunnel must be identified and repaired in time. At present, the detection of tunnel cracks in the domestic railways relies on the manual inspection mainly. It is difficult to satisfy the requirements of the rapidity and the accuracy of railway inspection by the manual inspection due to the subjective judgment of the inspection personnel. At the same time, tunnel images have some complex situations such as water stains, scratches, structural seams, uneven illumination, and a lot of noise, which have brought bottlenecks to the development of traditional image processing methods. It is necessary to adopt more effective methods to detect the tunnel cracks in time. This paper builds the first tunnel crack dataset with semantic segmentation annotation and proposes an objective and fast tunnel crack identification algorithm using semantic segmentation in computer vision to construct a complete tunnel crack identification and analysis system. The system applies advanced semantic segmentation to the railway tunnel image analysis to achieve precise segmentation of tunnel crack locations, thereby saving the railway department a lot of manpower and material resources and improving efficiency.

Study on the degradation rule of calcitonin in vitro in patients with medullary thyroid carcinoma

BackgroundIt was found that calcitonin in vitro can degrade rapidly whether in refrigeration or at room temperature, which increases the difficulty of accurate detecting of calcitonin greatly. This study was designed to solve this problem. MethodsSerum samples with increased calcitonin from patients with medullary thyroid carcinoma were collected and divided into refrigeration and room temperature group. Analyze the degradation rule of calcitonin in the two groups according to the time of blood draw (T0), the time of sample detection (Tx), and the concentration (y) measured at Tx. ResultsThe degradation rate of calcitonin was significantly different between the two storage conditions. The degradation has plateau stage and its concentration is associated with the original concentration. The degradation rule of the two groups can be expressed by the formula: y = -aln(x) + b. In the formula, b/a are constants associated with storage condition and gender. “x” is the time interval between blood draw and detection, that is, x = Tx - T0. ConclusionsThe significance of the presence of immunoreactive isoforms and fragments of calcitonin with different stability in patients with medullary thyroid carcinoma is unclear. To make the inspection report more accurate and reliable, maybe the inspection personnel should report both the instrumental and corrected result, and also indicate the correction formula on the inspection report.

On the Importance of Building Engineering Materials Detection in the New Period

With the rapid development of economy and technology, there are moreand more types of construction engineering materials, and more and more inputs. In order to ensure the overall quality of construction projects, we must pay attention to the quality inspection of construction materials. Because the inspection is affected by many factors, resulting in inaccurate test results, it is necessary to continuously increase the supervision of the construction materials inspection work, improve the comprehensive quality of the inspection personnel, and thus improve the accuracy of the quality inspection of construction materials and promote the healthy and long-term development of China's construction industry. The article mainly analyzes the importance of building engineering material testing and proposes several optimization strategies for building engineering material testing technology.

Tunnel inspection using photogrammetric techniques and image processing: A review

During the last few decades many tunnelling projects were conducted in order to use limited land surface area more efficiently. Such underground constructions are used for transportation such as for railways, subways and roads, to host equipment used for experiments like particle accelerators, as well as for pipelines and mines. Independent of their purpose, tunnels should be regularly inspected in order to avoid accidents resulting from structure failure and to simultaneously extend their lifetime by identifying deterioration at an early stage and perform the required maintenance. Traditional methods of tunnel inspection rely on manual vision monitoring and sensing equipment that requires installation and contact with the tunnel surface. Apart from being time consuming, tedious and expensive, manual inspection is also highly dependent on human subjectivity and exposes inspection personnel to possible dangerous environments. Taking these issues into consideration, various systems were proposed to automate different procedures of tunnel inspection using photographic equipment to capture photos of the tunnel environment, apply photogrammetric and computer vision (CV) techniques and conduct image processing (IP) on them to achieve different surveying goals. This manuscript provides a collective review of the current state of the art in tunnel inspection based on photogrammetric techniques and IP.

Trimming and production losses associated with bacterial arthritis in lambs presented to an abattoir in southern Australia

Bacterial arthritis in sheep is a painful and debilitating condition that is widespread across all sheep-raising regions and climatic zones of Australia. At slaughter, bacterial arthritis in sheep causes economic losses through the condemnation of all or parts of the carcass, as specified in the Australian Standard for the Hygienic Production and Transportation of Meat and Meat Products for Human Consumption. In this study, we investigated the economic cost of arthritis in lambs presenting to an abattoir in southern Australia using a combination of the prevalence of arthritis detected during meat inspection, condemnation rates, trim weight and carcass weight, and fat measurements. Data were collected on 354 lines of lambs representing 63287 carcasses. One hundred and sixty nine consignments, or approximately one-half of the consignments, had at least one carcass with arthritis/polyarthritis detected by meat inspection personnel. Four hundred and twenty-two, or 0.7%, of the carcasses had arthritis/polyarthritis in at least one joint. When arthritis was present, on average 2.0% of the line was affected. Three carcasses with arthritis were condemned and the remainder trimmed, with an average trim weight of 0.7 kg. In addition, arthritis reduced the growth of lambs by 1.2 kg hot standard carcass weight, approximately 2.7 kg liveweight (assuming 45% dressing percentage) and reduced fat cover by 1.8 mm.

The methanol content of illicit alcoholic beverages seized in a low socio-economic area of Tel-Aviv: public health impact and policy implications

To identify the presence and concentration of methanol in illegal alcoholic beverages sold commercially in a low socio-economic area of Tel-Aviv. Additionally, we aim to assess if findings represent an existing risk for public health in the area. Ministry of Health Division of Enforcement and Inspection personnel carried out a series of inspections in grocery stores and kiosks in two adjacent neighborhoods of low socio-economic status: Neve Sha’anan and Hatikvah. Twenty-six samples of illicit drinks were identified, seized, and then analyzed for the presence and concentration of methanol. Alcohol products seized were spirits labeled as vodka, brandy, arak and “scotch flavor” drinks, which contained an average of 36.608% volume of ethanol. Methanol was detected in 15 samples. Methanol concentration levels varied considerably, from 12 to 4534 g/hl. Data of hospital emergency department visits revealed that only nine cases of methanol toxicity were reported for years 2014–2017, and none of them by area hospitals. We identified the sale of alcoholic beverages with high methanol content in the disadvantaged areas of Tel-Aviv, though hospitalization data does not reveal a high prevalence of cases involving methanol toxicity. This may be related to misreporting or underreporting by area emergency rooms. Policy implications include the need to inform local shopkeepers and shop-owners on labeling regulations, and make information and health warnings accessible to the foreign-born population residing in the area. A larger sample is needed to determine the extent of the sale of methanol-containing illicit alcoholic beverages.

Surface Profiling and Core Evaluation of Aluminum Honeycomb Sandwich Aircraft Panels Using Multi-Frequency Eddy Current Testing.

Surface damage on honeycomb aircraft panels is often measured manually, and is therefore subject to variation based on inspection personnel. Eddy current testing (ECT) is sensitive to variations in probe-to-specimen spacing, or lift-off, and is thus promising for high-resolution profiling of surface damage on aluminum panels. Lower frequency testing also allows inspection through the face sheet, an advantage over optical 3D scanning methods. This paper presents results from the ECT inspection of surface damage on an approximately flat aluminum honeycomb aircraft panel, and compares the measurements to those taken using optical 3D scanning technology. An ECT C-Scan of the dented panel surface was obtained by attaching the probe to a robotic scanning apparatus. Data was taken simultaneously at four frequencies of 25, 100, 400 and 1600 kHz. A reference surface was then defined that approximated the original, undamaged panel surface, which also compensated for the effects of specimen tilt and thermal drift within the ECT instrument. Data was converted to lift-off using height calibration curves developed for each probe frequency. A damage region of 22,550 mm2 area with dents ranging in depth from 0.13–1.01 mm was analyzed. The method was accurate at 1600 kHz to within 0.05 mm (2σ) when compared with 231 measurements taken via optical 3D scanning. Testing at 25 kHz revealed a 3.2 mm cell size within the honeycomb core, which was confirmed via destructive evaluation. As a result, ECT demonstrates potential for implementation as a method for rapid in-field aircraft panel surface damage assessment.