This paper describes a method for prefabricating screw, pneumatic, and solenoid valves and embedding them in microfluidic devices. This method of prefabrication and embedding is simple, requires no advanced fabrication, and is compatible with soft lithography. Because prefabrication allows many identical valves to be made at one time, the performance across different valves made in the same man...

Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) is gaining in popularity in microfluidic devices because of its low cost, excellent optical transparency, attractive mechanical/chemical properties, and simple fabrication procedures. It has been used to fabricate micromixers, PCR reactors, CE and many other microdevices. Here we present the design, fabrication, characterization and application of pneumatic micr...

In the paper, we interest to smart actuators. External model has been defined in order to improve behavioural of actuator in presence of failures. The external model requires information from Fault Detection and Isolation algorithms. To complete the information providing to the users, we associate bond graph methodology to the external model in order to complete the information with physical kn...

Pneumatic actuators afford advantages such as flexibility, low weight, and explosion-proofness. However, increasing the number of pressure supply tubes using solenoid valves in a multi-degree-of-freedom system may negate these advantages. Therefore, this study proposes soft actuator that uses self-excited vibrations realized by an airflow between two flexible plates to open close valve manner s...

1 SUMMARY Possibilities of new applications of smart devices arise with the development of new generation wind turbines. Rotor up-scaling implies a need to control dynamic characteristics of loads transferred from blades to the hub and tower. The motivation for this work was to demonstrate an approach to control dynamic reaction force resulting from a wind blow. A controllable gas spring was ch...

In this paper, we developed a detailed mathematical model of dual action pneumatic actuators controlled with proportional spool valves. Effects of nonlinear flow through the valve, air compressibility in cylinder chambers, leakage between chambers, end of stroke inactive volume, and time delay and attenuation in the pneumatic lines were carefully considered. System identification, numerical sim...

AbstractIn this paper, a new compensator is designed so as to eliminate the effect of stiction in the control loop. A wellknown stiction compensation method is proposed that reduces variability both at process variable and valve stem movement. Pneumatic control valves are widely used in the process industry. Stiction is the most common and one of the long-standing problems in the pneumatic cont...

pneumatic actuators are attractive for robotics and automation applications; however, achieving fast and accurate control of their position have been known as a complex control problem. The paper presents a methodology for obtaining controllers that achieve high position accuracy and preserve the closed-loop characteristics over a broad operating range. Experimentation with a number of conventi...