Industry 4.0, Nakajima Test, Elderly healthcare: Cross-disciplinary projects in the yearly Project Course for Exchange Students.

Industry 4.0, Nakajima Test, Elderly healthcare: Cross-disciplinary projects in the yearly Project Course for Exchange Students.

Two months to apply in “real life” what has been learned during the years of university education, starting from a plan to the delivery of a final solution. This was the task the international students participating in the MT1490 yearly project course. Three teams of students, have on January 10th presented the results of multidisciplinary research and development projects run under the supervision of four teachers from PDRL: Alessandro Bertoni, Marco Bertoni, Azad Syed Chowdhery and Shafiqul Islam.

Chiara Bratelli and Pier Giorgio Travaglia, from Bergamo University in Italy, have engaged the future of Industry 4.0 exploring how methods for developing products and services will benefit from the “IoT revolution” in the manufacturing industry. Their detailed research work mapped and analysed the most suitable methods to embrace this industrial evolution. “We will in the next mounts test our findings in collaboration with Italian companies interested in the transition toward industry 4.0 and product service systems”, says Chiara, student at the last year of the master in management engineering.

Mingyue Yu and Yixuan Lu, from Shanghai Second Polytechnic University and Kunming University in China, presented the virtual prototype of a system to help elderly people to stand up from the bed to be used both in hospitals and private homes. The virtual prototype included both the mechanical and the control system design and is now moving toward the physical prototype. “We will stay at BTH in the next months to complete the product outside the frame of the course, everything is set to create a physical prototype, based on that we will refine our design and eventually think about patenting our solution” say the students.

FInally, Yijie Guo and Yaowen Shen, from Shanghai Second Polytechnic University, presented a new design for a cheaper and more effective machine to perform Nakajima test in soft materials, including the possibility to control the test from distance through a smartphone application. They dig into mechatronic and showcase a working prototype of the new machine (shown in figure).

“I am impressed about the results obtained in only two months. The students worked on topics that they liked and were highly committed, and today we saw that this combination can bring very good results in a short period of time.” says Alessandro Bertoni, responsible of the course  “I am also very happy to see that such projects do not stop at the end of the course, but there is a strong interest from the students to bring them forward and improve their solution in the near future”.

Good luck to the students for the further development of their work!

Working prototype of the new machine for Nakajima Test.