Abstract
The European Project Semester (EPS) is a one semester capstone project/internship framework offered by the EPS providers to engineering, product design and business undergraduates. While a student-centred project-based learning offer, EPS proposes a unique multidisciplinary and multicultural teamwork set up to promote soft, technical and scientific competencies. In the spring of 2016, the EPS at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) welcomed a team of engineering students who chose to develop a sustainable water desalinator, the working principle relying on solar energy and natural temperature differences to convert saline water into fresh water. This paper describes the team's journey, including the motivation, the solution design process, considering the technical & scientific state of the art as well as the potential impact in terms of ethics, sustainability and marketing, and the development and testing of the prototype. The results obtained validate the purpose of the developed system since a significant reduction of the salt water conductivity, to values of the same order of magnitude of tap water, were observed. Although improvements can be made, the desalinator prototype produced 70 ml/d of distilled water in late spring and 7 ml/d in midwinter atmospheric conditions.

Abstract
This paper presents the development process of a sustainable solution to grow aromatic plants in small houses. The solution is called The GreenHouse and is meant for people who live in small houses or city apartments and want fresh home grown aromatic plants, but have neither the time nor the space to grow them. The solution is intended to be sustainable and appropriate for people concerned with eating healthy, fresh food. The project was developed by a team of five students enrolled in the European Project Semester (EPS) at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) during the spring of 2017. EPS@ISEP is a project-based learning framework which aims to foster personal, teamwork and multidisciplinary problem-solving skills in engineering, business and product design students. Research and discussions within the team were done to develop the product. The existing solutions for growing fresh food in industrial and domestic applications as well as marketing, sustainability and ethical topics were researched and discussed. This way it was possible to define the requirements of The GreenHouse. The GreenHouse is semi-automatic and requires little interaction from the customer. It has two covers, a winter cover and a summer cover, to be changed depending on the season and weather. Solar energy and rainwater are used to enable the growth of aromatic plants, making this a sustainable system. The support is adaptable and made to fit different support sizes so it can be hanged on balconies or windows. © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.

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Control and monitoring systems capabilities are unavoidable to improve product quality, reduce production time, and to the rapid adaptation to changes in production. Therefore, it is advantageous to develop control and monitoring systems, and maximize the use of the resources already available in machine tools, without high additional costs and hard implementations. The use of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) on industries is growing. This sort of controller has been an election tool to attend present day requirements. It has the necessary resources to acquire and manage the information and control of the machines, and easily interacts with SCADA systems. The objective of the study described in this paper was to develop a solution for monitoring a metal casting machine, which could replace an outdated system installed on it, and find a solution to control a metal pouring process. All programs that allow the PLC to control the machine movements, and also perform the casting process, were developed during the project implementation. The results show that the developed solution is able to control the machine without the need to invest in a PC, which is a more expensive solution and with a more limited life time. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017.

Abstract
The implementation of automatic systems to execute tasks on the automotive industry brings many advantages when compared to humans. The quality, reliability and safety emerge as important advantages in the use of automatic systems. Vehicles such as buses, ambulances and garbage trucks, among others, are produced by smaller companies that are specialised in a certain genre of vehicles. The small quantities of the production series and the high rate of customization per client make it impossible to use fully automated production lines. This study aimed to determine the advantages of using a robotic welding cell to produce bus body structures and to follow its implementation in the production process. In order to make a reliable data comparison, it was chosen a part from the bus's luggage to execute all necessary tests which will be welded using an out of service robot already owned by the company. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.