Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Design Of Versatile Feedback Control System Components For Selective Laser Sintering, Thomas Chessman

University Scholar Projects

Selective laser sintering (SLS) is an additive manufacturing technique that involves using a laser to fuse powdered material together, layer by layer, in order to create a 3-D product. Despite its numerous benefits over traditional methods of manufacturing, including higher efficiency, versatility, and the ability to process many materials, selective laser sintering suffers from its propensity to generate structural errors during operation.

Feedback control has been shown to improve fabrication quality in other laser-based additive manufacturing techniques when implemented properly. Widespread exploration of applying feedback control in SLS might lead to significant performance improvements in this form of manufacturing.

This …

Performance-On-Demand Mems (Podmems): Electrical Control Of Effective Mass, Damping, And Stiffness, Shehrin Sayed

Open Access Theses

We propose the use of electrostatic force feedback to control the stiffness, damping, or mass of MEMS. If feedback forces are proportional to sensed displacement, velocity, or acceleration of a MEMS proof mass, then feedback can be used to increase or decrease the apparent stiffness, damping, and or mass of the MEMS. Such feedback can be used to compensate for process variations, packaging stress, thermal drift, viscous damping, etc. Prior efforts by others include position or velocity based feedback for modifying frequency, bandwidth, quality factor, or sensitivity of resonators. We present a means of quantitative control of stiffness, damping, and …