A novel Building Integrated Concentrating Photovoltaic (BICPV) Smart Window has been designed and developed as a next generation intelligent window system. In response to climatic conditions, the smart window varies solar light transmission into the building for provision of light and heat with the reflection of light to the photovoltaic (PV) for electricity generation. This unique function is ...

Design and Performance Tradeoffs of High-Gain Observers with Applications to the Control of Smart Material Actuated Systems

A smart structure is a system containing multifunctional parts that can perform sensing, control, and actuation; it is a primitive analogue of a biological body. Smart materials are used to construct these smart structures, which can perform both sensing and actuation functions. The ‘‘I.Q.’’ of smart materials is measured in terms of their ‘‘responsiveness’’ to environmental stimuli and their ‘...

Hysteresis in smart material actuators makes the effective use of these actuators quite challenging. The Preisach operator has been widely used to model smart material hysteresis. Motivated by positioning applications of smart actuators, this paper addresses the value inversion problem for a class of discretized Preisach operators, i.e., to find an optimal input trajectory given a desired outpu...

Many electroactive functional materials have been used in smalland microscale transducers and precision mechatronic control systems for years. It was not until the mid-1980s that scientists started integrating electroactive materials with large-scale structures as in situ sensors and/or actuators, thus introducing the concept of smart materials, smart structures, and structronic systems. This p...