International Journal of Instrumentation Technology (4 papers in press)

Regular Issues

• Development of image based analyser for sizing of raw materials in steel industry  
  by Tathagata Ray, Ashish Tiwari, Prabal Patra, Pratik Swarup Dash, Ashish Mukherjee, S. Balamurugan 
  Abstract: Quality coke as one of the raw material is very important to produce hot metal in Blast Furnace. Coal with required size fractions is fed to coke oven for efficient coking operation after stamping. The determination of size fraction of coal particles is very much essential for efficient stamping process. Offline sieve analysis is generally used for this purpose irrespective of highly time consuming, non- representative, maintenance prone. Real time machine vision system which robustly determines the size, distribution of free falling coal particles at the end of conveyor belt was developed to eliminate drawbacks of sieving. The new feature extraction algorithm was developed to obtain features, a subset of which is statistically chosen on their relative relevance for classification using MDC (Minimum Distance Classifier), Bayes Gaussian Network and Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN) with PNN outperforming the others for 17000 training samples, and 15000 testing samples. Additionally, this size analysis result has been compared with that of sieve analysis and the outcome of this experiment shows slight tilt toward finer sizes which is desired since one of its application lies in minimizing the fine generation to optimize operation of the plant.
  Keywords: Chemical leaching; SCADA; FTV; PLC; Automation.
  
  
• DEPLOYMENT OF THE INDUCTANCE BASED QUASI DIGITAL SENSOR AND INSTRUMENT TO MONITOR THE METALLIC LIQUID LEVEL  
  by RAMESH SANGA, Metta Sivaramakrishna, Prabakararao G 
  Abstract: This paper reports on the design and development of an inductance type-level probe and instrument for continuous metallic liquid level monitoring. This study targeted towards the measurement of metallic liquid level in the process vessels of the pyroprocessing plant. Although there are a few sensors deployed to measure the metallic liquid level based on mutual inductance type principles, we proposed a quasi digital sensor approach due to the features like simple, low power, low cost, and direct digital readable output. The proposed sensor is designed by exploiting the principle of an LC type logic gate oscillator. In addition to sensor development, a microcontroller-based instrument is designed and developed to monitor the liquid level. An experiment is conducted to test the performance of the sensor using a lab-made experimental setup. Even though the developed sensor is targeted to work at 500oC and harsh environment, the sensor and instrument performance is tested and validated in the laboratory at room temperature with mercury as liquid metal. The presently developed sensor is suitable to measure the metallic liquid level in a confined tank in the range of 0 to 75 mm with a sensitivity of ~66Hz/mm.
  Keywords: Level Sensor; Pulse frequency; Quasi Digital Sensor; eddy current; Microcontroller,rnembedded system.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJIT.2021.10047409
   
  
• DCT based Rotational Invariant Unsupervised texture segmentation  
  by T. Ray, P. Patra 
  Abstract: Texture segmentation mainly focuses on dividing an object into different textures or regions with particular local properties. Usually unsupervised texture segmentation is more challenging than supervised texture segmentation. In unsupervised texture segmentation, feature based technique is more effective than model based methods due to simplicity and fastness. The present paper proposes an unsupervised texture segmentation based on mask based DCT as feature based technique. The proposed features are interesting as compared to plain wavelet and conventional DCT features for textures with and without rotation. Texture image database ranges from Brodatz album to natural scene. The proposed method performs well with the addition of white Gaussian noise. Moreover, post processing on feature images is not required.
  Keywords: DCT; Rotational invariance; Unsupervised texture segmentation; Wavelet transform; Automatic determination of number of textures.
  
  
• An analog building block for signal conditioning instrumentation circuits  
  by Enrique Spinelli, Marcelo Haberman 
  Abstract: The design of analogue signal conditioning circuits for instrumentation applications often requires designing a specific circuit for each case. For board-level design solutions, these circuits are generally implemented by using operational amplifiers (OA) and instrumentation amplifiers (IA). An analogue building block (ABB) is proposed, which can be implemented with three standard OAs. Using different connection schemes and just adding a few resistors, it allows implementing several analogue circuits such as common-mode conditioners, single-ended to differential and differential to single-ended converters, voltage and current amplifiers, current to voltage and voltage to current converters, among others. The proposed ABB is analysed and applied to several typical analogue conditioning problems. The design equations and experimental results for these circuits are presented.
  Keywords: analogue building blocks; ABBs; common-mode processing; signal conditioning; differential-mode processing; board level design.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJIT.2021.10046554