The Smart Pneumatics Lab
The Smart Pneumatics Lab is placed in room CB110 in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Robotics (FIER) and belongs to the Department of Robots and Manufacturing Systems. Its history begins in the ’80s as a computer center of the Department of Machine-Tools and Gears, one of the greatest academia and engineering departments. During the communist regime, between the ’70s and `80s, Romania was a great manufacturer of machine-tools, pushing the academia to create great engineers.
Following the revolution of 1989 until 2008, the laboratory had a purpose as a teaching facility for new disciplines that used the computer. Some of these disciplines were CAD Techniques and Computer Programming, disciplines that made a lot of UPB students participate in extracurricular activities. As time passed, the equipment has become obsolete, thus making the room unusable for modern teaching activities.
Things changed in 2008 when room CB110 became the first Technology Transfer Center in the Faculty of Engineering of Management and Technological Systems (FEMTS at that time). The Timișoara company Bibus SES, Romanian representative of Bibus AG, came up with a significant investment to bring students as close as possible to the engineers of employing companies. The main objective was to interface industry and academia with the help of this innovative, dynamic and private company who represented a very wide range of industry producers from all over the planet.
The Bibus Technology Center became a place where students made first contact with the industrial engineering market. They met many representatives of multinational companies new to the Romanian market. The investment of Bibus SES helped a lot of students to write their Bachelor’s projects or research papers, and at the same time, develop creativity and skills that later would be used by future engineers at work.
The UPBAIR team was born in 2017. This team has built a continuous research project and successfully won the annual participation at the international Pneumobile competition powered by Aventics in Eger, Hungary. The need to study and take a closer look at advanced pneumatic systems makes the laboratory upgrade in 2020, paving a new way into the field of pneumatic industry. Thanks to the help offered by the Aventics – Eger specialists, we began studying to create a complex experimental stand, aimed to help us understand better smart pneumatic systems. The integration of pneumatic systems through IIoT has become the main goal of our laboratory, and we are trying to bring as close as possible to industry students, graduate students, Ph.D. candidates and engineers.