Articles you may be interested in Electrothermally actuated microelectromechanical systems based omega-ring terahertz metamaterial with polarization dependent characteristics Appl. The role of the Casimir force on the analysis of microactuators is strongly influenced by the optical properties of interacting materials. Bifurcation and phase portrait analysis were used to compare the sensitivity ...

This study presents an innovative design of a microtab system for aerodynamic load control on horizontal-axis wind-turbine rotors. Microtabs are small devices located near the trailing edge of the rotor blades and enable a rapid increase or decrease of the lift force through deployment of the tabs on the pressure or suction side of the airfoil, respectively. The new system has been designed to ...

Oscillations in control loops are one of the most prevalent problems in industrial processes. Due to their adverse effect on the overall process performance, finding how oscillations propagate through the process units is of major importance. This paper presents a method for integrating process causality and topology which ultimately enables to determine the propagation path of oscillations in ...

An appropriate control scheme must be used to alleviate nonlinearities and uncertainties for the plant system. However, this is not a trivial task due to the fact that modeling the nonlinearities such as friction and stiction are always inaccurate. For this, adaptive and robust control approaches are preferable. Thus, this paper investigates a new suggested controller scheme namely Nominal Char...

Aqueous chemistries have recently been shown to be useful for the deposition of hydrophobic films of nonionic and cationic silanes on hydrophilic substrates for the prevention of stiction in MEMS. The Monte Carlo method is used to simulate in two dimensions the self-assembly of silane films on a hydrophilic surface. We investigate the impact of charged group in cationic silane on the overall st...

This paper reports on the design, fabrication, and testing of a low-actuation voltage Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) switch for high-frequency applications. The mechanical design of low spring-constant folded-suspension beams is presented first, and switches using these beams are demonstrated with measured actuation voltages of as low as 6 V. Furthermore, common nonidealities such as res...

The problem of designing a nonlinear observer for flexible-joint manipulators using a neural network approach is considered in this paper. In the first instance, no a priori knowledge about the system dynamics is assumed in developing the basic structure of the neural observer. The recurrent neural network configuration is obtained by a combination of a multilayer feedforward network and dynami...

To allow testing of micro-scale aerodynamics, a process was created to manufacture beam structures that combine spans of 1 cm with a cross-section of 5 μm by 100 μm. The structural considerations limiting the fabrication of a structure combining macro-scale spans with a micro-scale cross-section are analyzed. Limiting considerations include forces during operation, fluid forces during release, ...

The thermodynamic model of ultrathin lubricant film melting, confined between two atomically-flat solid surfaces, is built using the Landau phase transition approach. Non-equilibrium entropy is introduced describing the part of thermal motion conditioned by non-equilibrium and non-homogeneous character of the thermal distribution. The equilibrium entropy changes during the time of transition of...

Friction characteristics with respect to surface topographic orientation were investigated using surfaces of different materials and fabricated with grooves of different scales. Scratching friction tests were conducted using a nano-indentation-scratching system with the tip motion parallel or perpendicular to the groove orientation. Similar friction anisotropy trends were observed for all the s...