Konferenzbeiträge

Within the Research Training Group "Lorentz Force Velocimetry and Lorentz Force Eddy Current Testing" 12 PhD students from 6 countries (and actually 9 associated members from 5 more countries) are working at the faculties Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and lnformation Technology and Computer Science and Automation of the Technische Universität Ilmenau for their PhD. During a period of three years, they are studying together and collaborating but they have passed very different academic training courses. In the current educational program they have to pass a course which is called "Computational Engineering", including aspects of computational mechanics, computational electromagnetics, computational heat transfer, computational fluid dynamics, mathematical modelling and validation, across all three faculties. Additionally, there are lectures on measurement technology, material science, numerical methods, signal processing and optimization. Because in such interdisciplinary research teams a minimum of knowledge of all disciplines is required for successful collaboration, the establishment of the course "Computational Engineering" is considered as a challenge, not only for the lecturers. In the presentation will be shown the challenge and the chances for renewing the current curricula, from the point of view of electrical engineering and information technology.

In this paper we compare three figures of merit for estimating the information content to use it as a criterion for optimizing the placement of sensors. These figures of merit are compared for two sensor networks. In the first network, the sensors are distributed regularly, in the second one the sensors are distributed randomly. The simulation shows that small condition number with respect to the L2-norm can relate to the sensor network which has more information or also to the ones which has less information. The comparison based on the singular value decay for the two sensor networks.

With an increasing number of sensors within vehicles wireless solutions become more interesting in order to reduce manufacturing costs and wiring complexity. Besides that, wireless sensors will enable new applications that are difficult to achieve with wired solutions. A pure wireless solution has to guarantee the same quality of service as traditional wired networks while operating in a rather harsh environment. This is the most challenging task and therefore a suitable integration of the wireless technology into the existing vehicular networks is needed. In our contribution we discuss different existing networks, their historic development and compare them in order to identify suitable candidates for the mentioned integration. Finally, we present an option to couple 802.15.4 devices with Bluetooth and show preliminary results.