Machine maintenance is important for improving machine uptime, reliability, and reducing costs. Grease is used in most rolling element bearings, and one common failure criterion is water contamination, so developing a sensor which can detect water content automatically without human input could be a useful endeavor. The temperature dependence on the dielectric properties of water-contaminated grease is investigated in this paper with computer logged instrumentation. This method has been termed Dielectric Thermoscopy (DT). Several off the shelf (two lithium, one lithium complex, and two calcium sulphonate complex) and one unadditivized lithium grease are tested with varying amounts of water contamination from 0% to approximately 5%. Another grease is tested with small increments of added water from 0% to 0.97% to test the resolution of the measurement. The purpose is to use the capacitance temperature slope (termed dielectric thermoscopy) to show correlations to the water content of the grease sample and investigate if any grease types will pose problems in the measurement. A small, custom made fringe field capacitance sensor with an integrated temperature sensor has been used for this characterization and data is logged automatically with laboratory equipment and a PC. A useable and positive correlation to water content and the DT measurement of roughly 0.5 pF per 10 °C and percentage of water is found, although it was found that some greases have different behavior than others.

The performance of seven different correlation functions applied in Digital Image Correlation has been investigated using simulated and experimentally acquired laser speckle patterns. The correlation functions were constructed as combinations of the pure intensity correlation function, the gradient correlation function and the Hessian correlation function, respectively. It was found that the correlation function that was constructed as the product of all three pure correlation functions performed best for the small speckle sizes and large correlation values, respectively. The difference between the different functions disappeared as the speckle size increased and the correlation value dropped. On average, the random error of the combined correlation function was half that of the traditional intensity correlation function within the optimum region.

A dual-view polarization resolved digital-holographic system is presented. The necessary calibration for both polarization and spatial coordinates are outlined. As an example the system is is used to track spherical microparticles in a cuvette.

A novel dual-view polarization-resolved pulsed holographic system for particle measurements is presented. Both dual-view configuration and polarization-resolved registration are well suited for particle holography. Dual-view registration improves the accuracy in the detection of 3D position and velocities, and polarization-resolved registration provides polarization information about individual particles. The necessary calibrations are presented, and aberrations are compensated for by mapping the positions in the two views to positions in a global coordinate system. The system is demonstrated on a sample consisting of 7 μm spherical polystyrene particles dissolved in water in a cuvette. The system is tested with different polarizations of the illumination. It is found that the dual view improves the accuracy significantly in particle tracking. It is also found that by having polarization-resolved holograms, it is possible to separate naturally occurring sub-micrometer particles from the larger, 7 μm seeding particles.

The paper addresses intelligent and sustainable production achieved through combination and integration of online predictive maintenance, monitoring of process parameters and continuous quality control of both input materials and output from the process. This enables production systems, within both manufacturing and process industries, to move towards zero-defect manufacturing. Such a zero-defect manufacturing approach allows for earlier identification of problems or issues, which will or already negatively affect the output. The paper outlines the first part of the second cycle of an action research effort at Gestamp HardTech AB in Sweden, whose objective is to keep its position as a world-leading provider of press-hardened vehicle parts. In order to fully implement the zero-defect manufacturing approach, 4-6 action research cycles are expected to be needed in order to iteratively refine the approach. During the first cycle, various methods and solutions for some of the individual issues/problems have been conceptualized, realized and initially tested. The selected design criteria for the action research efforts were: simplicity, low cost, robustness, high-quality output and future-proofing. The result from the research in the second cycle so far is an action plan for the technical change and a set of challenges/problems which need additional investigation.

Defocused laser speckle photography is used as a tool to measure the heat responses in a titanium component during laser heating. The evolution of the response is compared with a set of preprocessed Finite Element Simulations of the corresponding process with the aim to verify the simulation model and to find the simulation settings that best resemble the experimental results. The titanium component consists of a 300 x 100 mm2 substrate of thickness 3.2 mm on which a 200 x 30 x 11 mm3 ridge is built up using the laser metal deposition by wire process. The component is heated on the top of the ridge by a 300 W laser for 10 s and the deformation of the subtrate is followed throughout the heating-cooling cycle. The simulated deformation gradient is shown to resemble the measured response, and the magnitude of the response indicates that about 70 % of the laser power transferres into heat in the metal.

Spectroscopic holography refers to techniques in which the detected hologram contains information about specific species in the medium under study. In general, at least two lasers are required with wavelengths chosen carefully to fit the interaction process utilized. In this process, energy from the shorter wavelength laser beam is transferred to the longer wavelength coherently through the process of stimulated emission. Two interaction mechanisms are considered; Stimulated Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) and Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS), which both are species specific with the ability of coherent interaction. In this paper, the fundamental properties of spectroscopic holography is presented and demonstrated with a few idealized experiments. These validation experiments are performed in a gas chamber in which different gases may be blended and the gas pressure changed between 1-12 bars. In addition, two examples of applications are presented. In the first set of experiments, LIF holography is used to image light absorption and laser heating in a dye simultaneously. The second set of experiments is performed in a ow of methane gas. It is demonstrated that the combination of holographic phase measurements and SRS gain images may be used for calibration. This calibration may further be used to measure absolute concentration in a burning flame.

Water-contaminated grease samples are investigated with attenuation spectra in the visible and near-infrared (NIR) regions in this article. The purpose of this investigation was to identify a model with optical attenuation spectra such that the water content of grease samples could be characterized with a simple measurement setup using common methodology from the field of instrumental chemistry. The ratio between two chosen wavelengths of light appears to approximate the water content of grease samples with an acceptable coefficient of determination using a methodology to show what can potentially be done to develop condition monitoring tools. To illustrate the outlined method, a prestudy of grease aging and oxidation levels is also investigated to show that other variables do not significantly change the measurement.

The two techniques of lateral shear interferometry and speckle deflectometry are analyzed in a common optical system for their ability to measure phase gradient fields of a thin phase object. The optical system is designed to introduce a shear in the frequency domain of a telecentric imaging system that gives a sensitivity of both techniques in proportion to the defocus introduced. In this implementation, both techniques successfully measure the horizontal component of the phase gradient field. The response of both techniques scales linearly with the defocus distance, and the precision is comparative, with a random error in the order of a few rad/mm. It is further concluded that the precision of the two techniques relates to the transverse speckle size in opposite ways. While a large spatial coherence width, and correspondingly a large lateral speckle size, makes lateral shear interferometry less susceptible to defocus, a large lateral speckle size is detrimental for speckle correlation. The susceptibility for the magnitude of the defocus is larger for the lateral shear interferometry technique as compared to the speckle deflectometry technique. The two techniques provide the same type of information; however, there are a few fundamental differences. Lateral shear interferometry relies on a special hardware configuration in which the shear angle is intrinsically integrated into the system. The design of a system sensitive to both in-plane phase gradient components requires a more complex configuration and is not considered in this paper. Speckle deflectometry, on the other hand, requires no special hardware, and both components of the phase gradient field are given directly from the measured speckle deformation field.

A concept for targetless, computer-aided design (CAD)-based, close-range photogrammetry for online shape inspection is introduced. The shape of an object, which is arbitrarily located on a conveyor belt, is to be measured and compared with its nominal shape as defined by a CAD model. For most manufactured objects, deviations are only measured at a few given comparison points. These deviations can be estimated using local photogrammetry based on a priori geometrical information given by the CAD model and the comparison points. Our method results in faster output with higher precision, because we do not generate a shape representation of the entire measured object using typical photogrammetric methods. Images depicting the object from convergent angles are captured by an array of cameras in a precalibrated network, and the CAD model is matched and aligned, within the projective geometry of the camera network, to the depicted object in the images without the use of targets. An algorithm for solving this virtual projective targetless shape matching problem is presented.