One of the most important factors in the development of a home appliance is the safety of the users. For this reason, the temperature control and the protection against human errors, such as the abandonment of the cookware while cooking, are always of interest in induction heating applications. This paper presents a solution for self-limiting the temperature in cooking vessels that prevents its overheating, protecting the system and preventing food from burning. It is proposed the manufacture of cookware with materials whose electromagnetic properties change at a preset temperature within the range of interest in cooking, these changes cause the power transmitted to the load to drop considerably providing self-protection capabilities against overheating. This solution does not require additional sensors or communication with the induction cooktop, making it a simple and economical option. The performance of the proposed solution has been analyzed using a multiphysics tool, which includes electromagnetic and thermal submodels, and allows to obtain the temperature distribution and the changes in the system as the vessel heats up. Finally, an experimental verification of the model and the solution has also been presented.

The use of materials with controlled electromagnetic properties, such as Curie temperature, for the development of different domestic induction heating applications can improve their safety, energy efficiency and performance.In this article, a measurement system for the magnetic characterization of ferromagnetic materials is presented. The study focuses on materials with low Curie temperature, since typically the information provided by the manufacturers of this type of alloys is limited, giving only the Curie point. It has been obtained the value of its magnetic permeability for different conditions of temperature, excitation current and frequency. These data are useful to carry out simulations of different induction heating applications and design power converters for these systems.The results obtained confirm the manufacturer’s Curie point and also provide the magnetic permeability values and their dependencies for use in simulations or system design.

In this paper, we address the problem of persistently covering an environment with a group of mobile robots. In contrast to traditional coverage, in our scenario the coverage level of the environment is always changing. For this reason, the robots have to continually move to maintain a desired coverage level. In this context, our contribution is a complete approach to the problem, including distributed estimation of the coverage and control of the motion of the robots. First, we present an algorithm that allows every robot to estimate the global coverage function only with local information. We pay special attention to the characterization of the algorithm, establishing bounds on the estimation error, and we demonstrate that the algorithm guarantees a perfect estimation in particular areas. Second, we introduce a new function to determine the possible improvement of the coverage at each point of the environment. Upon this metric, we build a motion control strategy that drives the robots to the points of the highest improvement while following the direction of the gradient of the function. Finally, we simulate the proposal to test its correctness and performance.

In this paper, we study different solutions of flexible cooking zones for induction hobs. Particularly, we focus on the usage of mobile inductors in two dimensions. The main contribution is the development of a mobile induction system which allows to heat circular pots with any size, in any position, with a homogeneous heat distribution. The good performance of this solution is tested experimentally. We present a theoretical model of the induction heating process which we use to analyze the heat distribution in a pot, and the main parameters of the problem. We also evaluate different heating strategies with a prototype with one double mobile inductor. From the obtained results, we can establish the best activation strategy of the inductor rings and the motion strategy as a function of the size of the heated pot.

This paper is focused on dynamic coverage control with a team of robots. In this framework, decentralized control algorithms have been investigated to deal with the efficient coordination of the resources. The main contribution is a novel global strategy based on a hierarchical grid decomposition of the domain. This decomposition allows an ordered coverage of the domain that combined with a gradient based control law of the local error, achieves a better performance than previous approaches of dynamic coverage. The total coverage of the domain is proven, and the good performance of the approach is supported with simulations.