Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 26-1 - 21

Fig. 6. I&M system for water stress assessment based on plant's ultrasonic emissions. (a) Piezoelectric transducer; (b)
Electronic system featuring analog front end, high-speed data acquisition and processing, wireless communication, and
solar energy harvesting.
The technological progress in making AE sensing devices
smaller, more energy-efficient and computationally
more powerful gradually unlocked the applications beyond
traditional fields of NDE and industrial machinery. One of
the exciting new application domains is precision agriculture,
where AE sensors have been recently utilized to assess
early symptoms of water-stress on individual plants originating
from cavitation bubbles in xylem vessels [9], [12]
(Fig. 6). The reported I&M system utilizes a wake-up triggering
scheme for low-power high-speed acquisition and
processing of sporadic ultrasonic emissions. The system
first extracts a set of discriminant features from the computed
spectrograms and then applies an unsupervised
learning clustering algorithm to automatically categorize
emissions based on their spectral signatures. Unlike the
industrial I&M system shown in Fig. 5, all the data processing
is performed on a low-power embedded processor,
which is still a preferred solution for most cost-sensitive IoT
applications.
Conclusions
Recent technological developments and related emerging
applications have strongly affected the perception and
general understanding of I&M systems as more or less selfcontained
" packs " of technology and methods dedicated to
measurement. From benchtop laboratory instruments and industrial
process transmitters to miniaturized, autonomous,
networked devices empowered by artificial intelligence,
I&M systems have become more widespread, crossing the
boundaries between measurements, control, robotics, and
data science. At first, this may look confusing, driving us
February 2023
to rethink and reevaluate
both the terminology
and a general role of I&M
in today's seemingly complex
world. However, one
needs to remember that
the main pillars of I&M
still rely on fundamental
knowledge in technical
disciplines related to measurements
and electronic
measurement technology
[13]. On the road to the
next-generation I&M, this
fundamental knowledge
needs to be well understood,
maintained, and
further developed to best
utilize the incoming power
of technology.
References
[1] R.F. Wolffenbuttel, " Introduction to electronic instrumentation, "
Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands, accessed May
2022. [Online]. Available: https://ocw.tudelft.nl/wp-content/
uploads/Reader_ET8017_Electronic_Instrumentation__
Chapter1.pdf.
[2] K. R. Fowler and J. Schmalzel, " Why do we care about
measurement? " IEEE Instrum. Meas. Mag., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 38-46,
Mar. 2004.
[3] K. Brinker and R. Zoughi, " Future trends for I&M, " IEEE Instrum.
Meas. Mag., vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 3-9, May 2020.
[4] F. Griffiths and M. Ooi, " The fourth industrial revolution-
Industry 4.0 and IoT [Trends in Future I&M], " IEEE Instrum. Meas.
Mag., vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 29-43, Dec. 2018.
[5] J. K. Huang, " Non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of composites:
acoustic emission (AE), " in Non-destructive Evaluation (NDE)
of Polymer Matrix Composites, V. M. Karbhari, Ed. Cambridge,
England, UK: Woodhead Publishing, 2013.
[6] B. Casals, K. A. Dahmen, B. Gou et al, " The duration-energy-size
enigma for acoustic emission, " Scientific Reports, vol. 11, no. 5590,
2021.
[7] F. Zonzini et al., " Structural health monitoring and prognostic
of industrial plants and civil structures: a sensor to cloud
architecture, " IEEE Instrum. Meas. Mag., vol. 23, no. 9, pp. 21-27,
Dec. 2020.
[8] D. Oletic, L. Korman, M. Magno and V. Bilas, " Time-frequency
pattern wake-up detector for low-power always-on sensing of
acoustic events, " in Proc. 2018 IEEE Int. Instrum. Meas. Technol.
Conf. (I2MTC), pp. 1-6, 2018.
[9] D. Oletic, E. Herth, D. Bouville, E. Martincic and V. Bilas, " Designing
micro-mechanical cantilever resonator arrays for wideband
IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine
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Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 26-1

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