Automotive Engineering Commons^™

Robust Control Techniques Enabling Duty Cycle Experiments Utilizing A 6-Dof Crewstation Motion Base, A Full Scale Combat Hybrid Electric Power System, And Long Distance Internet Communications, Marc Compere, Jarrett Goodell, Miguel Simon, Wilford Smith, Mark Brudnak

Publications

The RemoteLink effort supports the U.S. Army's objective for developing and fielding next generation hybrid-electric combat vehicles. It is a distributed soldierin- the-Ioop and hardware-in-the-Ioop environment with a 6-DOF motion base for operator realism, a full-scale combat hybrid electric power system, and an operational context provided by OneSAF. The driver/gunner crewstations rest on one of two 6-DOF motion bases at the U.S. Army TARDEC Simulation Laboratory (TSL). The hybrid power system is located 2,450 miles away at the TARDEC Power and Energy System Integration Laboratory (P&E SIL). The primary technical challenge in the RemoteLink is to operate both laboratories together …

Real-Time Identification Of Sliding Friction Using Labview Fpga, Laine Mears, Jeannie S. Falcon, Thomas R. Kurfess

Publications

Friction is present in all mechanical systems, and can greatly affect system stability and control in precision motion applications. In this paper, we present application of a frictional model to trajectory planning of a part centering system with real-time identification of model parameters through system force and position response. This identification is carried out using LabVIEW motion control software and digital signal processing (DSP) and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware. A comparison of hardware performance for force measurement is also made.

Energy Efficient Process Heating: Insulation And Thermal Mass, Kevin Carpenter, J. Kelly Kissock

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Open tanks and exterior surfaces of process heating equipment lose heat to the surroundings via convection, radiation, and/or evaporation. A practical way of reducing heat loss is by insulating or covering the surfaces. This paper presents methods to quantify heat loss and energy savings from insulating hot surfaces and open tanks. The methods include radiation and evaporation losses, which are ignored by simplified methods. In addition, thermal mass, such as refractory, conveyor and racking equipment, acts as a heat sink and increases heating energy use in process heating applications. This paper presents lumped capacitance and finite-difference methods for estimating heat …

Energy Efficient Process Heating: Managing Air Flow, Kevin Carpenter, J. Kelly Kissock

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Much energy is lost through excess air flow in and out of process heating equipment. Energy saving opportunities from managing air flow include minimizing combustion air, preheating combustion air, minimizing ventilation air, and reconfiguring openings to reduce leakage.

This paper identifies these opportunities and presents methods to quantify potential energy savings from implementing these energy-savings measures. Case study examples are used to demonstrate the methods and the potential energy savings.The method for calculating savings from minimizing combustion air accounts for improvement in efficiency from increased combustion temperature and decreased combustion gas mass flow rate.

The method for calculating savings from …

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 …