Table of contents

The 2nd International congress of Mechanical Engineering and Agricultural Science (CIIMCA 2015) looked to exchange new scientific knowledge on mechanical engineering, agricultural science, materials science and related topics. The CIIMCA 2015 was organized by the Mechanical Engineering Faculty of the 'Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana' of Bucaramanga. It was held from 7th to 9th October 2015 at 'Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana' of Bucaramanga, Colombia. The meeting aimed to provide a high level international conference for researchers in mechanical engineering and related themes.

The CIIMCA brought together the latest results and discussed new advances over a broad range of topics dealing with vibration modeling & testing, renewable energy and thermofluids analytical, science and drying technology, materials science, automation and agricultural science and engineering education as well as case studies. We did our best to provide the delegates with an environment conducive to the exchange of knowledge, networking and making new friends.

We want to thank our colleagues who contributed considerably to the event by organizing topical symposia and by helping us to launch this important meeting. We are truly grateful for their efforts.

PhD. Aduljay Remolina-Millan.

Chairman, International Congress of Mechanical Engineering and Agricultural Science Congress -CIIMCA 2015.

PhD. Rolando Guzman-Lopez.

Chairman, International Congress of Mechanical Engineering and Agricultural Science Congress -CIIMCA 2015.

Organised by

Mechanical Engineering Faculty

Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana of Eucaramanga.

Floridablanca, Colombia.

Conference Organisation

Chairmen

PhD. Aduljay Remolina-Millan.

Associate professor

Mechanical Engiennering Faculty

Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana of Bucaramanga

PhD. Rolando Guzman-Lopez.

Mechanical Engiennering Faculty

Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana of Bucaramanga

Acknowledgments

The organizing committee wants to thank the Editorial Committee for their support, participation and valuable contribution to CIIMCA 2015.

The organizing committee wants to thank the Mechanical Engineering Faculty and the "Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana seccional Bucaramanga" for its support and funds given to the development of CIIMCA 2015.

We want to thank our sponsors and contributors for their support and cooperation in the organization of the CIIMCA 2015 Congress.

Finally, the organizing committee wants to thank all attendees of CIIMCA 2015, thanks for your enthusiastic participation.

The organizing committee wants to specially thank Sarah Toms, Conference Commissioning Editor of the IOP Conference Series for her support and help in the process of publishing the papers from CIIMCA 2015 in the IOP Conference Series.

All papers published in this volume of IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering have been peer reviewed through processes administered by the proceedings Editors. Reviews were conducted by expert referees to the professional and scientific standards expected of a proceedings journal published by IOP Publishing.

Starch is one of the most abundant biopolymer in nature. It has been primarily used as a thickener in the food industry. Starch is found in greater amounts in the potato tubers, which is one of the largest food productions in the region of Boyacá-Colombia. Thus, potatoes are a viable source of starch. The main objective of this study is the preparation and characterization of native starch's microfiber by electro wet-spinning technique. The parameters that were changed for each treatment were as follows: the amount of potential applied to the solution, the distance between the needle and the collector and the rate of injection of the solution in order to determine the physical and chemical properties of the membranes, conformed by potatoes starch microfiber. Diverse instrumental analysis techniques were applied. They were: Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to determine the morphologies and diameters of microfibers, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) to determine the chemical changes, Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA) and Differential Calorimetry Scanning (DSC) to obtain the thermal transitions and the temperatures of useful. The microfibers were analysed in order to determine their structural properties and thus define the range of application. In conclusion, potatoes starch microfibers were obtained with average diameters of 15, 17, 23 and 25 micrometres, besides the fibers presented a degradation temperature of 304 °C, indicating that fibers are available with diameters of small scale, with good thermal properties. This study will enable the implementation of the microfibers to obtain bio packaging for food products and other applications.

Getting a healthy and comfortable indoor environment in homes in southern Europe is a complicated task. In continental climates, with very cold temperatures in winter and very hot in summer, energy consumption greatly increases with air conditioning significant spending. To propose action guidelines for use of natural ventilation and to develop effective design strategies is essential. Therefore, and given a specific building type block of flats in Madrid, this article focuses on establishing what periods of the year natural ventilation is required to reduce energy consumption in air conditioning, also considering the quality of the outdoor environment and the design of the building. To develop this, a statistical study of the chosen type, that allows studying the direction and the wind speed in the area, is performed. Analysis of wind pressures in holes in the facade is performed by means of numerical simulations of fluid flow (CFD) inside to later infer in the natural ventilation rate required within policy parameters. With the data obtained, a study of energy saving is made as a function of natural ventilation rate established for the building type.

The main goal of method validation is to demonstrate that the method is suitable for its intended purpose. One of the advantages of analytical method validation is translated into a level of confidence about the measurement results reported to satisfy a specific objective. Elemental composition determination by wavelength dispersive spectrometer (WDS) microanalysis has been used over extremely wide areas, mainly in the field of materials science, impurity determinations in geological, biological and food samples. However, little information is reported about the validation of the applied methods. Herein, results of the in-house method validation for elemental composition determination by WDS are shown. SRM 482, a binary alloy Cu-Au of different compositions, was used during the validation protocol following the recommendations for method validation proposed by Eurachem. This paper can be taken as a reference for the evaluation of the validation parameters more frequently requested to get the accreditation under the requirements of the ISO/IEC 17025 standard: selectivity, limit of detection, linear interval, sensitivity, precision, trueness and uncertainty. A model for uncertainty estimation was proposed including systematic and random errors. In addition, parameters evaluated during the validation process were also considered as part of the uncertainty model.

The rapid evolution of electronics and communication technologies in the last years has contributed to the expansion of Precision Livestock Farming applications. In this context, animal geolocation systems applied to extensive farming are interesting for farmers to optimize their daily work organization. Nevertheless, the deployment of these solutions implies several technical challenges which must be resolved, mainly the energy consumption and the suitability of the communication protocols. A recently developed solution that deals with these technical challenges is the e-Pasto platform, which is composed of low power geolocation devices embedded into collars that offer an energetic autonomy of at least seven months, completed with a visualization user interface. The autonomy is assured employing a duty-cycle operation that results in one geolocation position measurement per hour. This work studies the employ of accelerometers to overcome this limitation assuring, at the same time, the required autonomy for the geolocation device. The authors also propose an algorithm that processes the acceleration data in order to identify the steps of an individual. The whole solution (step identification and geolocation) has been validated by means of several experimental tests.

In this paper, the development and implementation of an algorithm is presented to identify the trajectory of a mobile robot based on data from an Inertial Measurement Unit with nine degrees of freedom consisting of a 3-axis accelerometers, an 3-axis gyroscopes, an 3- axis magnetometers, and an additional temperature sensor to compensate for temperature errors. The combined information from this set of sensors allows determining the trajectory and orientation of the robot at any moment to complement the information from its navigation system. Initially, it was necessary to build controlled test environments that allow observing and getting to know the trajectory and the dimensions thereof for capturing the raw data of the mobile robotic platform. Then, the data obtained form the sensor was processed off-line applying a Kalman filter with the aim to remove Gaussian noise; to estimating the trajectory and the absolute orientation of the mobile robotic platform the proposed algorithm was implemented. This implementation used the hardware elements are inexpensive, thus allowing the necessary testing, the data analysis and the interpretation of the outcome to be replicable and to be used as an educational tool within courses of undergraduate and master level. The elements of hardware used in this implementation are cheap, allowing its reproduction for the analysis and interpretation of data and can be used as an educational tool in courses of undergraduate and master level.

In the here presented study, the biomechanical design and coupling of a servomotor as measuring element for determining the angle of elbow flexion in humans is presented. This task requires a digital servomotor with a 12-bit low charge encoder type ''contactless absolute", which makes the holding torque negligible. Because the servomotor is used as a sensor and not as an actuator, and is expected to produce the least possible resistance to the movement of the elbow, this is a crucial point. Additionally, the biomechanical design of the structure for coupling the servomotor was carried out considering the different movements of the arm and forearm, and the necessity to not interfere with the natural movement of the arm. The measurement resolution allows obtaining the flexion angle to an accuracy of 0.088; and integrated into the embedded system used to communicate with the servomotor, that allows obtaining and analyzing data and temporarily integrating information for counting repeats or measuring the speed of movements, among others. This system will also be useful to calibrate and compare other compatible biomechanical analysis models, where the same movement is analyzed.

This paper proposes the development of a counting aerial system capable of capturing, process and analyzing images of an oil palm plantation to register the number of cultivated palms. It begins with a study of the available UAV technologies to define the most appropriate model according to the project needs. As result, a DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ is used to capture pictures that are processed by a photogrammetry software to create orthomosaics from the areas of interest, which are handled by the developed software to calculate the number of palms contained in them. The implemented algorithm uses a sliding window technique in image pyramids to generate candidate windows, an LBP descriptor to model the texture of the picture, a logistic regression model to classify the windows and a non-maximum suppression algorithm to refine the decision. The system was tested in different images than the ones used for training and for establishing the set point. As result, the system showed a 95.34% detection rate with a 97.83% precision in mature palms and a 79.26% detection rate with a 97.53% precision in young palms giving an FI score of 0.97 for mature palms and 0.87 for the small ones. The results are satisfactory getting the census and high-quality images from which is possible to get more information from the area of interest. All this, achieved through a low-cost system capable of work even in cloudy conditions.

This paper presents the parametric uncertainties identification of a robotic system of one degree of freedom. A MSC-ADAMS / MATLAB co-simulation model was built to simulate the uncertainties that affect the robotic system. For a desired trajectory, a set of dynamic models of the system was identified in presence of variations in the mass, length and friction of the system employing least squares method. Using the input-output linearization technique a linearized model plant was defined. Finally, the maximum multiplicative uncertainty of the system was modelled giving the controller desired design conditions to achieve a robust stability and performance of the closed loop system.

This paper presents the identification of uncertainness that affects the dynamics of a flow and level system. Initially, flow a level system is descripted. Then, family of plants is determined from the identification of dynamic model for different operating conditions. The uncertain model reflects the changes for different operating conditions when the output flow and storage tank dimensions are varied. Finally, the maximum multiplicative uncertain is calculated to define the desired controller specifications to achieve a robust stability and performance of the closed loop system.

Smart Grids are a technology that can be used to implement a sustainable energy scheme of a country. Therefore, this paper proposes the development of a prospective analysis of Smart Grids as a tool to ensure energetic security in Colombia in 2050. Using LEAP software, a base scenario for Colombian energy demand has developed according to current policies, with a time horizon from 2012 to 2050. The energy analysis is based on three scenarios, taking into account the impact of cogeneration in the residential and industrial sector using renewable energy and the power quality indicators. The results show that the implementation of Smart Grids generate energy savings and increasing the coverage of the national electricity system, ensuring energetic security of the country by 2050.

This paper presents the modelling of lighting behaviour of a hybrid lighting system - HLS in inner spaces for tropical climate. HLS aims to mitigate the problem of high electricity consumption used by artificial lighting in buildings. These systems integrate intelligently the daylight and artificial light through control strategies. However, selection of these strategies usually depends on expertise of designer and of available budget. In order to improve the selection process of the control strategies, this paper analyses the Electrical Engineering Building (EEB) case, initially modelling of lighting behaviour is established for the HLS of a classroom and an office. This allows estimating the illuminance level of the mixed lighting in the space, and energy consumption by artificial light according to different lighting control techniques, a control strategy based on occupancy and a combination of them. The model considers the concept of Daylight Factor (DF) for the estimating of daylight illuminance on the work plane for tropical climatic conditions. The validation of the model was carried out by comparing the measured and model-estimated indoor illuminances.

This paper presents an analysis of hybrid lighting systems of Electrical Engineering Building in the Industrial University of Santander, which is a pilot of green building for warm- tropical conditions. Analysis of lighting performance of inner spaces is based on lighting curves obtained from characterization of daylighting systems of these spaces. A computation tool was made in Excel-Visual Basic to simulate the behaviour of artificial lighting system considering artificial control system, user behaviour and solar condition. Also, this tool allows to estimate the electrical energy consumption of the lighting system for a day, a month and a year.

This research shows the energy analysis of the Electrical Engineering Building, located on campus of the Industrial University of Santander in Bucaramanga - Colombia. This building is a green pilot for analysing energy saving strategies such as solar pipes, green roof, daylighting, and automation, among others. Energy analysis was performed by means of DesignBuilder software from virtual model of the building. Several variables were analysed such as air temperature, relative humidity, air velocity, daylighting, and energy consumption. According to two criteria, thermal load and energy consumption, critical areas were defined. The calibration and validation process of the virtual model was done obtaining error below 5% in comparison with measured values. The simulations show that the average indoor temperature in the critical areas of the building was 27°C, whilst relative humidity reached values near to 70% per year. The most critical discomfort conditions were found in the area of the greatest concentration of people, which has an average annual temperature of 30°C. Solar pipes can increase 33% daylight levels into the areas located on the upper floors of the building. In the case of the green roofs, the simulated results show that these reduces of nearly 31% of the internal heat gains through the roof, as well as a decrease in energy consumption related to air conditioning of 5% for some areas on the fourth and fifth floor. The estimated energy consumption of the building was 69 283 kWh per year.

The objective of drying medicinal plants is to extend the shelf life and conserving the fresh characteristics. This is achieved by reducing the water activity (aw) of the product to a value which will inhibit the growth and development of pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms, significantly reducing enzyme activity and the rate at which undesirable chemical reactions occur. The technical drying process requires an enormous amount of thermal and electrical energy. An improvement in the quality of the product to be dried and at the same time a decrease in the drying cost and time are achieved through the utilization of a controlled conventional drying method, which is based on a good utilization of the renewable energy or looking for other alternatives which achieve lower processing times without sacrificing the final product quality. In this work the method of stepwise drying of medicinal plants is presented as an alternative to the conventional drying that uses a constant temperature during the whole process. The objective of stepwise drying is the decrease of drying time and reduction in energy consumption. In this process, apart from observing the effects on decreases the effective drying process time and energy, the influence of the different combinations of drying phases on several characteristics of the product are considered. The tests were carried out with Melissa officinalis L. variety citronella, sowed in greenhouse. For the stepwise drying process different combinations of initial and final temperature, 40/50°C, are evaluated, with different transition points associated to different moisture contents (20, 30, 40% and 50%) of the product during the process. Final quality of dried foods is another important issue in food drying. Drying process has effect in quality attributes drying products. This study was determining the color changes and essential oil loses by reference the measurement of the color and essential oil content of the fresh product was used. Drying curves were obtained to observe the dynamics of the process for different combinations of temperature and points of change, corresponding to different conditions of moisture content of the product.

The detection, localization and characterization of defects in a material or a part that conform a structure is possible by using the transmission and reception of ultrasonic signals. Different strategies are used to achieve extract information from the part under evaluation. For this, it is then possible to use a distributed sensors arrays on the surface of the material and using scanning techniques such as are A-scan or B-scan, where it is possible to increase the level of detail regarding location, orientation and size of defects found, according to the strategy used. However, the systems and inspection techniques are often limited by the geometries and access to different types of structures. Due to these reasons, the acquisition of the returned signals, for identification and attenuation time, can suppress valuable information for accurate characterization of imperfections found in shape and location. In this paper, the use of spectral analysis of the collected signals is proposed as a tool for detection and characterization of defects in a structure. This analysis allows to determining the power distribution in a frequency range. This methodology is useful in non-destructive evaluation when it is not possible to have full access to the structure under inspection. In this case it is applied on a wind turbine operating to make the study of different echoes captured according to the geometry of the part and comparing said conducting analysis with previously established patterns of shapes, orientations, and sizes of defects found.

Damage detection is the basis of the damage identification task in Structural Health Monitoring. A good damage detection process can ensure the adequate work of a SHM System because allows to know early information about the presence of a damage in a structure under evaluation. However this process is based on the premise that all sensors are well installed and they are working properly, however, it is not true all the time. Problems such as debonding, cuts and the use of the sensors under different environmental and operational conditions result in changes in the vibrational response and a bad functioning in the SHM system. As a contribution to evaluate the state of the sensors in a SHM system, this paper describes a methodology for sensor fault detection in a piezoelectric active system. The methodology involves the use of PCA for multivariate analysis and some damage indices as pattern recognition technique and is tested in a blade from a wind turbine where different scenarios are evaluated including sensor cuts and debonding.

Small improvement in thermal efficiency of power cycles brings huge cost savings in the production of electricity, for that reason have a tool for simulation of power cycles allows modeling the optimal changes for a best performance. There is also a big boom in research Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC), which aims to get electricity at low power through cogeneration, in which the working fluid is usually a refrigerant. A tool to design the elements of an ORC cycle and the selection of the working fluid would be helpful, because sources of heat from cogeneration are very different and in each case would be a custom design. In this work the development of a multiplatform software for the simulation of power cycles and refrigeration, which was implemented in the C ++ language and includes a graphical interface which was developed using multiplatform environment Qt and runs on operating systems Windows and Linux. The tool allows the design of custom power cycles, selection the type of fluid (thermodynamic properties are calculated through CoolProp library), calculate the plant efficiency, identify the fractions of flow in each branch and finally generates a report very educational in pdf format via the LaTeX tool.

Despite restrictions and bans on the use of many organochlorine pesticides in the 1970s and 1980s, they continue to persist in the environment today. This is the case of Agustin Codazzi, Cesar where the organochlorine pesticides were buried without control in the soil in 1999, after being banned their use. Nowadays is necessary to find the best method, which allows remediation of this soils. Reductive dechlorination is the first and limiting step in the metabolism of many organochlorine pesticides by anaerobic bacteria. In this study the reductive conditions were enhanced by addition of biogas as an auxiliary electron donors.The soil sample was taken from the zone at Agustin Codazzi, Cesar, and their characteristics correspond to a loam soil with low nutrient and slight compaction. The experimental tests were performed by varying the exposure time of a reducer to oxidative environment. Reductive conditions were enhanced by methane from biogas and oxidative environment was generated by air blown to stimulate a metabolic process of the soil native bacteria. Removals between 70 and 78.9% of compounds such as 4,4'-DDT, 4, 4'-DDD, 4,4'-DDE, Endrin and Trans- Chlordane, detected by gas chromatography analysis, were achieved under reductive/oxidative conditions during 120 days. Furthermore, bacterial strains capable of degrading organochlorine pesticides were selected from the native bacteria, and identified by the purified and identified based on its morphological characteristics and 16S rDNA sequencing.

This work shows the main features of an automatic humidification system to provide drying air that match environmental conditions of different climate zones. This conditioned air is then used to assess the drying process of different agro-industrial products at the Automation and Control for Agro-industrial Processes Laboratory of the Pontifical Bolivarian University of Bucaramanga, Colombia. The automatic system allows creating and improving control strategies to supply drying air under specified conditions of temperature and humidity. The development of automatic routines to control and acquire real time data was made possible by the use of robust control systems and suitable instrumentation. The signals are read and directed to a controller memory where they are scaled and transferred to a memory unit. Using the IP address is possible to access data to perform supervision tasks. One important characteristic of this automatic system is the Dynamic Data Exchange Server (DDE) to allow direct communication between the control unit and the computer used to build experimental curves.

This study reports the optimization of innovation chemical techniques in order to improve the remediation of soils contaminated with organochloride pesticides. The techniques used for remediation were dehalogenation and chemical oxidation in soil contaminated by pesticides. These techniques were applied sequentially and combined to evaluate the design optimize the concentration and contact time variables. The soil of this study was collect in cotton crop zone in Agustin Codazzi municipality, Colombia, and its physical properties was measure. The modified dehalogenation technique of EPA was applied on the contaminated soil by adding Sodium Bicarbonate solution at different concentrations and rates during 4, 7 and 14 days, subsequently oxidation technique was implemented by applying a solution of KMnO₄ at different concentration and reaction times. Organochlorine were detected by Gas Chromatography analysis coupled Mass Spectrometry and its removals were between 85.4- 90.0% of compounds such as 4, 4'-DDT, 4,4'-DDD, 4,4-DDE, trans-Clordane y Endrin. These results demonstrate that the technique of dehalogenation with oxidation chemistry can be used for remediation soils contaminated by organochloride pesticides.

The main purpose of this project was to design, construct and evaluate a system of forced solar water heating for domestic consumption, at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana-Bucaramanga, Colombia; using solar energy. This is a totally system independent of the electrical grid and an important characteristic is the heating water doesn't mix with the consumption water. The system receives the solar radiation through a flat-plate collector, which it transmits the heat to the water that it flow with impulse from the centrifugal pump of 12VDC, the water circulates toward helical serpentine it is inside of the tank of the storage whose capacity is 100 liters of water. The temperature of the tank is regulated with a controller in such a way that de-energized the pump when it gets the temperature required. The performance thermal or efficiency of the system was evaluated like a relationship between the delivered energy to the water in storage tank and the incident energy in the flat-plate collector.