London Underground serves 1.7 billion passengers per year and the Victoria Line accounts for 213 million of those journeys. The line carries 89.1 million passengers per year in the peak service, offering the most intensive service on the underground network. Over the past eight years, a £1 billion investment programme upgraded and replaced the Victoria Line’s rolling stock and signaling and control systems to deliver a service capable of running more than 33 trains per hour. The new signalling system uses 385 Jointless Track Circuits (JTCs) to detect train position, maintain safe train separation and deliver train headways capable of meeting an extremely demanding timetable. Track circuits are the sole means of train detection and play a critical role in the safe and reliable operation of the railway; however, no provision was made for any condition monitoring during the design and installation. Because of the critical nature of the asset, a failed track circuit has a major impact on the service and constitutes the biggest cause of passenger disbenefit on the Victoria Line, amounting to £1.5 million since their introduction (London Underground CuPID database for Track Circuit failures since 2012). The Victoria Line Condition Monitoring Team, made up of six professional engineers with rail, software, electrical, mechanical, network and engineering backgrounds, delivered the solution. National Instruments Silver Alliance Partner Simplicity AI supported the project by providing additional software consulting services. We used the company’s enormous breadth of expertise to deliver the system onto an operational railway within one year of the concept design. The scope of this project consisted of designing, integrating and installing an intelligent remote condition monitoring system that could perform real-time analysis of voltage and frequency for all 385 JTCs across a 45 km of deep tube railway to predict and prevent failures and subsequent loss of passenger service. We took advantage of the accuracy, reliability and flexibility of NI hardware and software to implement an innovative system to reduce the lost customer hours experienced on the Victoria Line. The system is forecast to reduce lost customer hours by 39,000 per year—an estimated £350,000 savings per year in passenger disbenefit.

The Central Advanced Research and Engineering Institute at Hyundai Motor Company develops future mobility technologies. Rather than provide conventional vehicle products to customers, this research center creates new mobility devices with a wide range of speeds for a variety of people, including the elderly and the disabled. As our society ages, there is a greater need for systems that can aid mobility. Thus, we are developing wearable exoskeleton robots with NI embedded controllers for the elderly and patients with spinal cord injuries to use.Key ChallengeDeveloping a system that can handle complex control algorithms to capture data remotely from various sensors simultaneously and perform real-time control of multiple actuators for a wearable robotics device for walking assistance.

The current state of condition monitoring requires manual measurements that are compounded with aging equipment and the retirement of knowledgeable personnel.

Tecnalia is experienced in the automotive sector and in the development of controllers embedded in powertrain ECUs. Implementing three models that emulate the unavailable functioning and communications electronic control units (ECUs) for an electric/hybrid vehicle propulsion system.

The modern grid comes with new engineering challenges. In the United Kingdom, as renewable energy resources are being used to supplement fossil fuel production, power quality issues are surfacing. Combine this with the rapidly increasing demand for energy and the decommissioning of fossil fuel plants, and grid operators are finding that traditional measurement systems do not offer adequate coverage to handle these new challenges and manage the new risks the industry faces.

Developing a control system for a vertical, floating wind turbine that can monitor the operating conditions of the turbine, control it to make sure it operates at its highest efficiency, gather and log data, and securely transfer the data to operators and developers anywhere in the world for analysis and continuous development.