Degradation of gold contacts in micro-switches was studied under an extensive range of operation conditions including high-electric-field ac/dc hot switching, low-electric-field hot switching and cold switching. Tests were conducted in a unique experimental switching operation set-up. Gold micro-contacts were characterized by an atomic force microscope. It was found that a unique material trans...

When a flow suffers a discontinuity in its vector field at some switching surface, the flow can cross through or slide along the surface. Sliding can be understood as the flow along an invariant manifold inside a switching layer. It turns out that the usual method for finding sliding modes – the Filippov convex combination or Utkin equivalent control – results in a degeneracy in the switching l...

The paper by Liana, Zhao, and Dimirovskid shows one of the latest advances in switched systems by incorporating sliding mode control with a nonlinear integral switching surface. It is worthwhile comparing two types of switching mechanisms employed in this work. The first type is the system structural switching with an average dwell time. Hence, the switching frequency should be finite, and the ...

Multi-Walled CNT (MWCNT) are synthesized on a silicon wafer and sputter coated with a gold film. The planar surfaces are mounted on the tip of a piezo-electric actuator and mated with a gold coated hemispherical surface to form an electrical contact. These switching contacts are tested under conditions typical of MEMS relay applications; 4 V, with a static contact force of 1 mN, at a low curren...

This paper studies the problem of optimal switching surface design for hybrid systems. In particular, a formula is derived for computing the gradient of a given integral performance cost with respect to the switching surface parameters. The novelty of the work lies both in the problem formulation itself, and in the introduction of a discrete event variational system for propagating the perturba...

This paper describes a design problem of the controller in switched systems. A switched system is a hybrid dynamical system consisting of continuous-time subsystems and a rule that controls the switching between them. The uncertainties of stability in the switching surface is a very sufficient problem in designing a switching-type controller. The stability analysis in the switching surface and ...