Exploring barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing based new product development in manufacturing SMEs

Crowdsourcing is an innovative business practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content or even funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people(the ‘Crowd'). The potential benefits of utilizing crowdsourcing in product design are well-documented, but little research exists on what are the barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing in new product development(NPD) of manufacturing SMEs. In order to answer the above questions, a Proof of Market study is carried out on crowdsourcing-based product design under an Innovate UK funded Smart project, which aims at identifying the needs, challenges and future development opportunities associated with adopting crowdsourcing strategies for NPD. The research findings from this study are reported here and can be used to guide future development of crowdsourcing-based collaborative design methods and tools and provide some practical references for industry to adopt this new and emerging collaborative design method in their business.     

Designing a new generalized battery management system

Battery management systems (BMSs) are used in many battery-operated industrial and commercial systems to make the battery operation more efficient and the estimation of battery state nondestructive. The existing BMS techniques are examined in this paper and a new design methodology for a generalized reliable BMS is proposed. The main advantage of the proposed BMS compared to the existing systems is that it provides a fault-tolerant capability and battery protection. The proposed BMS consists of a number of smart battery modules (SBMs) each of which provides battery equalization, monitoring, and battery protection to a string of battery cells. An evaluation SBM was developed and tested in the laboratory and experimental results verify the theoretical expectations.     

A system for inverter protection and real-time monitoring

A real-time system for protecting and monitoring a DC/AC converter has been designed and constructed. The proposed system consists of (a) a hardware protection unit for fast reaction, load protection and inverter fail-safe operation and (b) a microcontroller unit for calculating critical parameters of the inverter operation. The control unit malfunctions have not been investigated in this study. The proposed hardware architecture and sensors form a low-cost and reliable control unit. The experimental results show that the proposed system ensures the inverter protection and fail-safe features. The proposed unit can be used to increase the reliability of any power inverter in AC motor drives, renewable energy systems, etc. or can be incorporated in any UPS system.