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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Technique For Unmanned Air Vehicles, Nathan Slegers, Jason Kyle, Mark Costello
Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Technique For Unmanned Air Vehicles, Nathan Slegers, Jason Kyle, Mark Costello
Faculty Publications - Biomedical, Mechanical, and Civil Engineering
A nonlinear model predictive control strategy is developed and subsequently specialized to autonomous aircraft that can be adequately modeled with a rigid 6-degrees-of-freedom representation. Whereas the general air vehicle dynamic equations are nonlinear and nonaffine in control, a closed-form solution for the optimal control input is enabled by expanding both the output and control in a truncated Taylor series. The closed-form solution for control is relatively simple to calculate and well suited to the real time embedded computing environment. An interesting feature of this control law is that the number of Taylor series expansion terms can be used to indirectly …
Cool Flames At Terrestrial, Partial, And Near-Zero Gravity, Michael R. Foster, Howard Pearlman
Cool Flames At Terrestrial, Partial, And Near-Zero Gravity, Michael R. Foster, Howard Pearlman
Faculty Publications - Biomedical, Mechanical, and Civil Engineering
Natural convection plays an important role in all terrestrial, Lunar, and Martian-based, unstirred, static reactor cool flame and low-temperature autoignitions, since the Rayleigh number (Ra) associated with the self-heating of the reaction exceeds the critical Ra (approximately 600) for onset of convection. At near-zero gravity, Ra < 600 can be achieved and the effects of convection suppressed. To systematically vary the Ra without varying the mixture stoichiometry, reactor pressure, or vessel size, cool flames are studied experimentally in a closed, unstirred, static reactor subject to different gravitational accelerations (terrestrial, 1g; Martian, 0.38g; Lunar, 0.16g; a n dr e - duced gravity, ∼10−2g). Representative results show the evolution of the visible light emission using an equimolar n-butane:oxygen premixture at temperatures ranging from 320 to 350 ◦C (593–623 K) at subatmospheric pressures. For representative reduced-gravity, spherically propagating cool flames, the flame radius based on the peak light intensity is plotted as a function of time and the flame radius (and speed) is calculated from a polynomial fit to data. A skeletal chemical kinetic Gray-Yang model developed previously for a one-dimensional, reactive– diffusive system by Fairlie and co-workers is extended to a two-dimensional axisymmetric, spherical geometry. The coupled species, energy, and momentum equations are solved numerically and the spatio-temporal variations in the temperature profiles are presented. A qualitative comparison is made with the experimental results.
Transient Heat Partition Factor For A Sliding Railcar Wheel, T C. Kennedy, C Plengsaard, Robert F. Harder
Transient Heat Partition Factor For A Sliding Railcar Wheel, T C. Kennedy, C Plengsaard, Robert F. Harder
Faculty Publications - Biomedical, Mechanical, and Civil Engineering
During a wheel slide the frictional heat generated at the contact interface causes intense heating of the adjacent wheel material. If this material exceeds the austenitising temperature and then cools quickly enough, it can transform into martensite, which may ultimately crack and cause wheel failure. A knowledge of the distribution of the heat partitioned into the wheel and the rail and the resulting temperature fields is critical to developing designs to minimize these deleterious effects. A number of theoretical solutions have appeared in the literature to model the thermal aspects of this phenomenon. The objective of this investigation was to …