Controls and Control Theory Commons^™

Active Management Assistant System For Embry-Riddle Ecocar 3 Hybrid Supervisory Control System, Matthew Nelson, Blair Cutting, Michael J. Aleardi

Student Works

The Embry-Riddle EcoCAR 3 team is developing a prototype hybrid Chevrolet Camaro utilizing a customized vehicle powertrain controller. This controller is serving to ensure system safety, vehicle operation, and consumer drivability while also incorporating advanced driving aids to achieve both the desired performance levels one expects from a Camaro as well as vehicle efficiency. This vehicle must reach the team set vehicle technical specifications of a 4.9 second 0 to 60 time while maintaining a 53 miles per gallon gasoline equivalence rating.

In order to reach the efficiency goal, the team is developing an Active Management Assistance System utilizing computer …

Safe Haptics-Enabled Patient-Robot Interaction For Robotic And Telerobotic Rehabilitation Of Neuromuscular Disorders: Control Design And Analysis, Seyed Farokh Atashzar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Motivation: Current statistics show that the population of seniors and the incidence rate of age-related neuromuscular disorders are rapidly increasing worldwide. Improving medical care is likely to increase the survival rate but will result in even more patients in need of Assistive, Rehabilitation and Assessment (ARA) services for extended periods which will place a significant burden on the world's healthcare systems. In many cases, the only alternative is limited and often delayed outpatient therapy. The situation will be worse for patients in remote areas. One potential solution is to develop technologies that provide efficient and safe means of in-hospital and …

Investigation Of Model Predictive Control (Mpc) For Steam Generator Level Control In Nuclear Power Plants, Ahmad Taemiriosgouee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The capabilities and potential of Model Predictive Control (MPC) based strategies for steam generator level (SGL) controls in nuclear power plants (NPPs) have been investigated. The performance has been evaluated for all operating conditions that also include start-ups, low power operations and load rejections. These evaluations have been done for MPC controllers based on existing advanced methodologies, as well as for any potential performance improvement that can be achieved by fine tuning some of the parameters (based on the characteristics of the SGL) of the existing MPC approaches.

Two version of MPC have been designed and implemented. The Standard MPC …

Development Of Instrumentation And Control Systems For An Integral Large Scale Pressurized Water Reactor, Matthew Rowland Morrow Lish

Doctoral Dissertations

Small and large scale integral light water reactors are being developed to supply electrical power and to meet the needs of process heat, primarily for water desalination. This dissertation research focuses on the instrumentation and control of a large integral inherently safe light water reactor (designated as I²S-LWR) which is being designed as part of a grant by the U.S. Department of Energy Integrated Research Project (IRP). This 969 MWe integral pressurized water reactor (PWR) incorporates as many passive safety features as possible while maintaining competitive costs with current light water reactors. In support of this work, the …

Design And Control Of Close Proximity Indirect Exposure For Nonthermal Atmospheric Pressure Plasma-Based Oxidation Of Carbon Fiber Precursor, Truman Andrew Bonds

Doctoral Dissertations

A new plasma-based method for the stabilization of polyacrylonitrile carbon fiber precursor utilizing reactive chemical species derived from a custom atmospheric pressure plasma generation system was developed and demonstrated. As opposed to the conventional stabilization method of convective heating in air, plasma-based stabilization efficiently introduces oxidative reactive species that both diffuse through and react faster with the precursor filaments, resulting in a faster and more efficient process. This method was successfully demonstrated with a variety of precursor chemistries, grades and sizes. The development effort was entirely experimental, with successive processing devices designed and constructed to examine various aspects of the …

Robust Feedback Control Based On Low Order Models With Uncertainty Estimation For A Class Of Biomedical Problems, Hector Puebla, Miguel A. Gutierrez-Limon, Eliseo Hernandez-Martinez, Alejandra Velasco-Perez

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Synchronization Of Coupled Neurons Via Robust Feedback, Hector Puebla, Ricardo Aguilar-Lopez, Priti Kumar Roy

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Design And Implementation Of Ccny Dc Microgrid Testbed, Mahmoud Saleh, Yusef Esa, Yassine Mhandi, Werner Brandauer, Ahmed Mohamed

Publications and Research

This paper presents the design, control, energy management, and implementation of the City College of New York (CCNY) direct current (DC) microgrid laboratory testbed. This facility was custom designed and implemented by researchers at CCNY with minimal off-the-shelf components to enable significant flexibility and reconfiguration capability. The microgrid consists of renewable energy resources, energy storage system and controllable loads, and can operate in either a grid-connected or an islanded mode. The design steps, requirements, and results of the developed testbed were discussed. Moreover, several operational scenarios were tested. The experimental results verify the applicability and flexibility of the developed microgrid …

Performance-Robust Dynamic Feedback Control Of Lipschitz Nonlinear Systems, Winston Baker

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation addresses the dynamic control of nonlinear systems with finite energy noise in the state and measurement equations. Regional eigenvalue assignment (REA) is used to ensure that the state estimate error is driven to zero significantly faster than the state itself. Moreover, the controller is designed for the resulting closed loop system to achieve any one of a set of general performance criteria (GPC). The nonlinear model is assumed to have a Lipschitz nonlinearity both in the state and measurement equations. By using the norm bound of the nonlinearity, the controller is designed to be robust against all nonlinearities …

Control System Research And Development To Support Virtual Prototyping Of Pump And Motors, Rajith Weerasinghe, Monika Ivantysynova, Paul Kalbfleisch

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Virtual prototyping of positive pumps and motors is incredibly useful, increasing speed of development and lowering cost. The calculations of fluids discharge pressure, displaced by a swashplate-type-axial piston pump/motor is dependent on the load impedance driven by the unit. The load impedance is estimated by a variable orifice found downstream of the unit. Similarly, the suction line impedance is also estimated with an orifice. The current project aims to evaluate the various loading architectures in their ability to quickly and accurately create the desired impedance. The robustness of the loading architectures was tested on a wide range of pump sizes, …

Optimization-Free Optical Focal Field Engineering Through Reversing The Radiation Pattern From A Uniform Line Source, Yanzhong Yu, Qiwen Zhan

Qiwen Zhan

A simple and flexible method is presented for the generation of optical focal field with prescribed characteristics. By reversing the field pattern radiated from a uniform line source, for which the electric current is constant along its extent, situated at the focus of a 4Pi focusing system formed by two confocal high-NA objective lenses, the required illumination distribution at the pupil plane for creating optical focal field with desired properties can be obtained. Numerical example shows that an arbitrary length optical needle with extremely high longitudinal polarization purity and consistent transverse size of ~0.36λ over the entire depth of focus …

Tailoring Optical Complex Fields With Nano-Metallic Surfaces, Guanghao Rui, Qiwen Zhan

Qiwen Zhan

Recently there is an increasing interest in complex optical fields with spatially inhomogeneous state of polarizations and optical singularities. Novel effects and phenomena have been predicted and observed for light beams with these unconventional states. Nanostructured metallic thin film offers unique opportunities to generate, manipulate and detect these novel fields. Strong interactions between nano-metallic surfaces and complex optical fields enable the development of highly compact and versatile functional devices and systems. In this review, we first briefly summarize the recent developments in complex optical fields. Various nano-metallic surface designs that can produce and manipulate complex optical fields with tailored characteristics …

Creation Of Identical Multiple Focal Spots With Prescribed Axial Distribution, Yanzhong Yu, Qiwen Zhan

Qiwen Zhan

We present a scheme for the construction of coaxially equidistant multiple focal spots with identical intensity profiles for each individual focus and a predetermined number and spacing. To achieve this, the radiation field from an antenna is reversed and then gathered by high numerical aperture objective lenses. Radiation patterns from three types of line sources, i.e., the electric current, magnetic current and electromagnetic current distributions, with cosine-squared taper are respectively employed to generate predominately longitudinally polarized bright spots, azimuthally polarized doughnuts, and focal spots with a perfect spherically symmetric intensity distribution. The required illuminations at the pupil plane of a …

Phase Gradient Algorithm Method For 3-D Holographic Ladar Imaging, Jason W. Stafford, Bradley D. Duncan, David J. Rabb

Bradley D. Duncan

3-D holographic ladar uses digital holography with frequency diversity to add the ability to resolve targets in range. A key challenge is that since individual frequency samples are not recorded simultaneously, differential phase aberrations may exist between them making it difficult to achieve range compression. We describe steps specific to this modality so that phase gradient algorithms (PGA) can be applied to 3-D holographic ladar data for phase corrections across multiple temporal frequency samples. Substantial improvement of range compression is demonstrated with a laboratory experiment where our modified PGA technique is applied. Additionally, the PGA estimator is demonstrated to be …

Stochastic And Optimal Distributed Control For Energy Optimization And Spatially Invariant Systems, Jin Dong

Doctoral Dissertations

Improving energy efficiency and grid responsiveness of buildings requires sensing, computing and communication to enable stochastic decision-making and distributed operations. Optimal control synthesis plays a significant role in dealing with the complexity and uncertainty associated with the energy systems.

The dissertation studies general area of complex networked systems that consist of interconnected components and usually operate in uncertain environments. Specifically, the contents of this dissertation include tools using stochastic and optimal distributed control to overcome these challenges and improve the sustainability of electric energy systems.

The first tool is developed as a unifying stochastic control approach for improving energy efficiency …

Delay-Independent Stability Analysis Of Linear Time-Delay Systems Based On Frequency, Xianwei Li, Huijun Gao, Keqin Gu

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This paper studies strong delay-independent stability of linear time-invariant systems. It is known that delay-independent stability of time-delay systems is equivalent to some frequency-dependent linear matrix inequalities. To reduce or eliminate conservatism of stability criteria, the frequency domain is discretized into several sub-intervals, and piecewise constant Lyapunov matrices are employed to analyze the frequency-dependent stability condition. Applying the generalized Kalman–Yakubovich–Popov lemma, new necessary and sufficient criteria are then obtained for strong delay-independent stability of systems with a single delay. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by a numerical example.

A System For Monitoring And Managing Indoor Air Quality And Environmental Conditions, Ali Ibrahim

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The quality of indoor air depends on different types of pollutant sources existing in a semi-enclosed environment. The sources can be biological, chemical, or toxic pollutants. These sources can cause health issues and discomfort for occupants. One of the indicators of poor indoor air quality is Carbon Dioxide (CO₂). CO₂ can be used to indicate the indoor air exchange rate. The lack of air exchange means higher levels of CO₂. High levels of indoor particulates can also be an indication of poor air quality. Due to the lack of fresh air, air circulation, and air …

Hybrid Magneto-Rheological Actuators For Human Friendly Robotic Manipulators, Masoud Moghani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, many developments in the field of the physical human robot interaction (pHRI) have been witnessed and significant attentions have been given to the subject of safety within the interactive environments. Ensuring the safety has led to the design of the robots that are physically unable to hurt humans. However, Such systems commonly suffer from the safety-performance trade-off. Magneto-Rheological (MR) fluids are a special class of fluids that exhibit variable yield stress with respect to an applied magnetic field. Devices developed with such fluids are known to provide the prerequisite requirements of intrinsic safe actuation while maintaining the …

A Haptic Surface Robot Interface For Large-Format Touchscreen Displays, Mark Price

Masters Theses

This thesis presents the design for a novel haptic interface for large-format touchscreens. Techniques such as electrovibration, ultrasonic vibration, and external braked devices have been developed by other researchers to deliver haptic feedback to touchscreen users. However, these methods do not address the need for spatial constraints that only restrict user motion in the direction of the constraint. This technology gap contributes to the lack of haptic technology available for touchscreen-based upper-limb rehabilitation, despite the prevalent use of haptics in other forms of robotic rehabilitation. The goal of this thesis is to display kinesthetic haptic constraints to the touchscreen user …

A Stroke Therapy Brace Design, Evan Kirkbride

Electrical Engineering

Victims of stroke often have difficulty with rehabilitation. With limited movement on their affected arm, patients often do not want to move much for physical therapy. In this project, we design a robotic brace that helps stroke patients move their arm more effectively in a reaching or pulling motion. By giving patients more movement in their affected arm than they would have otherwise, patients gain more from rehabilitation. The brace also adapts to the patient’s needs, providing more inclination or resistance as needed for their physical therapy. This kind of therapy engages patients rather than relying on their likely dwindled …

Cal Poly Supermileage Electronic Fuel Injection, Alexander Pink

Electrical Engineering

Cal Poly Supermileage is a student-run engineering club that builds prototype gasoline vehicles optimized maximum fuel-efficiency. To power their vehicles, the Supermileage team makes use of single-cylinder, 4-stroke, electronically fuel-injected (EFI) gasoline engines. This report details the development, iterative design & test cycles, and integration of an EFI system for the Supermileage club. This project develops an EFI system that interfaces to the most common types of sensors found in the low-power Supermileage-range of engines, including throttle-position sensors, manifold absolute pressure sensors, gear-tooth hall-effect sensors, variable-reluctance position sensors, engine coolant temperature sensors, intake air temperature sensors, and exhaust oxygen sensors. …

Exertion Control, Travis Taylor

Electrical Engineering

Current wearable fitness devices give the user after-the-fact fitness data, but little real-time feedback. Exertion Control, a new wearable device, continuously measures the user’s heart rate, creates a heart rate target, and helps the user reach it. This project completes the senior design and master’s thesis requirements and contains two milestones. The senior design product continuously measures the wearer’s heart rate and logs it with a user-friendly interface. This data models the heart’s exertion response and recovery response. The master’s thesis device refines the closed control loop with the user to give them a workout optimized to fit their needs.

Automatic Water Pump Controller, Alam D. Salguero, Kyle Russell Marquez Weeks

Electrical Engineering

In countries including Indonesia, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, a city water authority supplies the clean water and pumps it into large ground-level storage tanks. A resident’s water pump then pumps the water to a water tank on top of his/her house. When the water level in the ground-level storage tank becomes too low, the pump siphons air and shuts down, requiring a resident to manually prime the water pump to get it running again. Residents struggle to monitor the water level of the tanks effectively and keep the pump running properly. To remedy the issue, the Automatic Water Pump …

How Can Occupancy Modeling And Occupancy Sensors Reduce Energy Usage In Academic Buildings: An Application Approach To University Of San Francisco, Paloma R. Duong

Master's Projects and Capstones

Buildings are amongst the highest energy consumers relative to industry and transportation. They account for 40% of the world’s energy consumption, due to the need for lighting, equipment, heating, cooling and ventilation. Academic buildings are multi-purpose buildings that create a challenge on energy reduction. Most are old and have fixed occupancy schedules, resulting in high energy consumption because these buildings experience significant occupancy variation throughout the day. Five academic buildings were analyzed; their building information, energy consumption data and methods to project energy savings have been analyzed. The case studies presented different strategies on predicting energy savings, but these have …

Simulation And Performance Evaluation Of Algorithms For Unmanned Aircraft Conflict Detection And Resolution, Jeffrey H. Ledet

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The problem of aircraft conflict detection and resolution (CDR) in uncertainty is addressed in this thesis. The main goal in CDR is to provide safety for the aircraft while minimizing their fuel consumption and flight delays. In reality, a high degree of uncertainty can exist in certain aircraft-aircraft encounters especially in cases where aircraft do not have the capabilities to communicate with each other. Through the use of a probabilistic approach and a multiple model (MM) trajectory information processing framework, this uncertainty can be effectively handled. For conflict detection, a randomized Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm is used to accurately detect …

Dynamic Extruder Control For Polymer Printing In Big Area Additive Manufacturing, Alex Christopher Roschli

Masters Theses

Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM) is 3D Printing on a large scale and can be used to create structures on the scale of cars and houses. Scaling up 3D printing to BAAM size meant fundamentally altering the traditional fused deposition modeling process by switching from a filament to a pellet material feed. This meant switching from a stepper motor extruder to a servo driven screw extruder. While increasing the throughput of the system, this new extruder increases the overall complexity. Effective control of the system is paramount to the success of BAAM enabling it to effectively scale in speed in …

Control Design Of A Single-Phase Dc/Ac Inverter For Pv Applications, Haoyan Liu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents controller designs of a 2 kVA single-phase inverter for photovoltaic (PV) applications. The demand for better controller designs is constantly rising as the renewable energy market continues to rapidly grow. Some background research has been done on solar energy, PV inverter configurations, inverter control design, and hardware component selection. Controllers are designed both for stand-alone and grid-connected modes of operation. For stand-alone inverter control, the outer control loop regulates the filter capacitor voltage. Combining the synchronous frame outer control loop with the capacitor current feedback inner control loop, the system can achieve both zero steady-state error and …

A Radial Basis Function Method For Solving Optimal Control Problems., Hossein Mirinejad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work presents two direct methods based on the radial basis function (RBF) interpolation and arbitrary discretization for solving continuous-time optimal control problems: RBF Collocation Method and RBF-Galerkin Method. Both methods take advantage of choosing any global RBF as the interpolant function and any arbitrary points (meshless or on a mesh) as the discretization points. The first approach is called the RBF collocation method, in which states and controls are parameterized using a global RBF, and constraints are satisfied at arbitrary discrete nodes (collocation points) to convert the continuous-time optimal control problem to a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem. The …

Impact Of Clustering Microgrids On Their Stability And Resilience During Blackouts, Mahmoud S. Saleh, Ammar Althaibani, Yusef Esa, Yassine Mhandi, Ahmed Mohamed

Publications and Research

In this paper, the impact of clustering multiple microgrids during blackouts, on their stability and supply availability, will be investigated. Microgrids have the capability of satisfying their emergency loads during blackouts. However, distributed energy resources (DERs)-dominated microgrids are affected by the uncertainty of their input energy supply, e.g. impact of solar irradiance on photovoltaic (PV) output. Moreover, an individual islanded microgrid is prone to instability issues due to large sudden load/generation changes. In order to increase the supply security, and enhance system stability, we propose to use the existing distribution grid infrastructure, if applicable, during blackouts to form microgrid clusters. …

Sensorless Rotor Position Estimation For Brushless Dc Motors, Iram G. Raza

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Brushless DC motor speed is controlled by synchronizing the stator coil current with rotor position in order to acquire an accurate alignment of stator rotating field with rotor permanent-magnet field for efficient transfer of energy. In order to accomplish this goal, a motor shaft is instantly tracked by using rotating rotor position sensors such as Hall effect sensors, optical encoders or resolvers etc. Adding sensors to detect rotor position affects the overall reliability and mechanical robustness of the system. Therefore, a whole new trend of replacing position sensors with sensorless rotor position estimation techniques have a promising demand.

Among the …