Virtual Sensors: a Tool to Improve Reliability

Virtual sensors is a powerful concept applicable in new application domain like health-care, entertainment, fitness, sport, social interaction etc. tanks its capability of integration of new components and functionality. Actually, virtual sensors can potentially use heterogeneous physical sensors in order to combine different types of data to compute a measurement. The concept “virtual Sensor" allows to apply the principle so-called analytical redundancy. This point is important because it allows to also achieving the objective of extending reliability and availability of the application domain without adding extra hardware complexity. Starting from the previous consideration, Virtual Sensors (VS) can be candidate to offer a solution to reduce the criticality of high-risk failures increasing their detectability and predicting the related failure mode. VS and the validation procedure in the measurement process allowed by their use, offer a new tool in the Industry 4.0 scenario. In the paper, an example of virtual sensor devoted to monitoring different sections of an inverter dedicated to photovoltaic application will be analyzed. In particular, will be shown how it is possible to monitor the temperature of the CPU employed on the control board.