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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

On-Line Realtime Water Quality Monitoring And Control For Swimming Pools, Paul Duffy, Gerard Woods, Sean O'Hogain, James Walsh, C. Caplier Sep 2009

On-Line Realtime Water Quality Monitoring And Control For Swimming Pools, Paul Duffy, Gerard Woods, Sean O'Hogain, James Walsh, C. Caplier

Conference Papers

Effective swimming pool water quality monitoring and control systems are important to safeguard public health and for bather comfort. Most Irish swimming pool monitoring systems rely heavily on manual methods for sampling, testing and data recording of important parameters. Microbiological testing is infrequent and results can often take days. The goal of this research is to develop a water quality monitoring and control system with real time data logging, automatic data analysis, remote monitoring and control, microbiological sampling capabilities and online connectivity. National Instruments hardware and its software package LabView form the basis of the monitoring and control system. Several …


Microcantilever-Based Force Sensing, Control And Imaging, Reza Saeidpourazar May 2009

Microcantilever-Based Force Sensing, Control And Imaging, Reza Saeidpourazar

All Dissertations

This dissertation presents a distributed-parameters base modeling framework for microcantilever (MC)-based force sensing and control with applications to nanomanipulation and imaging. Due to the widespread applications of MCs in nanoscale force sensing or atomic force microscopy with nano-Newton to pico-Newton force measurement requirements, precise modeling of the involved MCs is essential. Along this line, a distributed-parameters modeling framework is proposed which is followed by a modified robust controller with perturbation estimation to target the problem of delay in nanoscale imaging and manipulation. It is shown that the proposed nonlinear model-based controller can stabilize such nanomanipulation process in a very short …


Mitigating Crack Propagation In A Highly Maneuverable Flight Vehicle Using Life Extending Control Logic, Mohamed Mostafa Yousef Bassyouny Elshabasy Apr 2009

Mitigating Crack Propagation In A Highly Maneuverable Flight Vehicle Using Life Extending Control Logic, Mohamed Mostafa Yousef Bassyouny Elshabasy

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In this research, life extending control logic is proposed to reduce the cost of treating the aging problem of military aircraft structures and to avoid catastrophic failures and fatal accidents due to undetected cracks in the airframe components. The life extending control logic is based on load tailoring to facilitate a desired stress sequence that prolongs the structural life of the cracked airframe components by exploiting certain nonlinear crack retardation phenomena. The load is tailored to include infrequent injections of a single-cycle overload or a single-cycle overload and underload. These irregular loadings have an anti-intuitive but beneficial effect, which has …


Q-Learning Algorithm For Navigation Control Of Autonomous Blimp, Yiwei Liu, Zengxi Pan, David A. Stirling, Fazel Naghdy Jan 2009

Q-Learning Algorithm For Navigation Control Of Autonomous Blimp, Yiwei Liu, Zengxi Pan, David A. Stirling, Fazel Naghdy

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

In this research, an autonomous control system for blimp navigation was developed using reinforcement learning algorithm. The aim of this research is to provide a blimp the capability to approach a goal position autonomously in an environment, where the dynamical models of the blimp and the environment are unknown. Webots™ Robotics Simulator (WRS) was used to simulate and evaluate the control strategy obtained through a one-step Q-learning method. The simulation data generated via WRS were then processed and analysed within MATLAB. The simulation results showed that the control policy acquired from Q-learning is much more effective compared to the traditional …


Control Of Autonomous Airship, Yiwei Liu, Zengxi Pan, David A. Stirling, Fazel Naghdy Jan 2009

Control Of Autonomous Airship, Yiwei Liu, Zengxi Pan, David A. Stirling, Fazel Naghdy

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

Scientific research and development on the control of autonomous airship have shown a significant growth in recent years. New applications appear in the areas such as freight carrier, advertising, monitoring, surveillance, transportation, military and scientific research. The control of Autonomous airship is a very important problem for the aerial robots research. In this paper, the previous research on the control of autonomous blimp is reviewed, Several popular control methods are categorized and discussed in detail. Then an intelligent navigation control method, reinforcement learning control, is introduced in the autonomous blimp which was used for 2007 UAV Outback Challenge. The future …


Process Control And Automation Developments In Welding, J Norrish Jan 2009

Process Control And Automation Developments In Welding, J Norrish

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

With an international shortage of skilled welders and concerns about exposure of personnel to welding hazards it is appropriate to consider how joining processes can be simplified and automated. The paper reviews the process control techniques which have been applied to enhance the productivity and quality of welded joints. It seeks to explain the influence of power source design and computer control on these developments. In particular it will address the real time control of short arc GMAW and explain how by modulation of the transient electrical properties and high speed wire feed oscillation process performance has enhanced in several …


A Control Strategy For Output Maximisation Of A Pmsg-Based Variable-Speed Wind Turbine, M E. Haque, K M. Muttaqi, M Negnevitsky Jan 2009

A Control Strategy For Output Maximisation Of A Pmsg-Based Variable-Speed Wind Turbine, M E. Haque, K M. Muttaqi, M Negnevitsky

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

This paper presents a control strategy for output maximisation of a direct drive permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG)-based small-scale variable-speed wind turbine. The control topology uses a single switch three-phase switch-mode rectifi er and the generator torque, and power is controlled by controlling the switch duty cycle of the switch. To extract maximum power from the wind, the torque reference of the PMSG is calculated from generator speed and wind turbine characteristics. From this torque reference, a current reference is calculated using measured DC link voltage and generator speed. The current error is then used to control the duty cycle …


Online Performance Evaluation Of Alternative Control Strategies For Building Cooling Water Systems Prior To In-Situ Implementation, Zhenjun Ma, Shengwei Wang, Fu Xiao Jan 2009

Online Performance Evaluation Of Alternative Control Strategies For Building Cooling Water Systems Prior To In-Situ Implementation, Zhenjun Ma, Shengwei Wang, Fu Xiao

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

This paper presents the online test and evaluation of the performance of five practical control strategies (fixed set-point control method, fixed approach control method, two near optimal strategies and one optimal strategy) for building cooling water systems to identify the best strategy for future field validation. All of these strategies were tested and evaluated in a simulated virtual environment similar to the situation when they are actually implemented in practice. A virtual building system representing the real building and its central chilling system was developed and used to test the operational performance of the system controlled by different strategies. The …


Towards The Position Control Of Conducting Polymer Trilayer Bending Actuators With Integrated Feedback Sensor, Stephen John, Gursel Alici, Christopher D. Cook Jan 2009

Towards The Position Control Of Conducting Polymer Trilayer Bending Actuators With Integrated Feedback Sensor, Stephen John, Gursel Alici, Christopher D. Cook

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

Conducting polymers have a wide range of reversibly controllable properties, leading to a number of potentially useful devices for robotic applications, including actuators, sensors and batteries. Conducting polymers have the advantages of low weight, low cost, flexibility, small activation potentials (


Autopilot Development For An Rc Helicopter, Mark C. Arlinghaus Jan 2009

Autopilot Development For An Rc Helicopter, Mark C. Arlinghaus

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The development of an autopilot system for an RC helicopter presents interesting challengesfrom both a hardware and controls standpoint. The system detailed in this thesis utilizes a 13 state Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to fuse sensor data and provide a position/velocity/attitude estimate. A novel, state of the art hybrid PID/LQR controller is developed and compared with a full state Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The hybrid controller uses a proportional position, PID velocity outer loop coupled with an inner loop LQR for attitude control. The entire system is developed and implemented in hardware to produce a functional autopilot. The unit was …