Research effort in the field of variable stiffness actuators is steadily increasing, due to their wide range of possible applications and their advantages. In literature, various control methods have been proposed, solving particular problems in human-robot and robot-environment interaction applications, in which the mechanical compliance introduced by variable stiffness actuators has been show...

Digital Displacement Fluid Power Pumps/Motors are promising candidates for revolutionizing the efficiency of fluid power systems, which traditionally has suffered from poor efficiencies, especially at part load. The key to obtain efficient part load operation with digital displacement technology lies in the development of very fast switching seat valves with a corresponding low pressure loss. T...

BACKGROUND Incremental threshold loading (ITL) is a test of inspiratory muscle performance which is usually performed by breathing through a weighted inspiratory plunger, the load on the inspiratory muscles being increased by externally adding weights to the intake valve. This is not a true threshold device and may be inaccurate. This method was compared with a true threshold device consisting ...

Abstract: The present paper introduces a control oriented model based on air and burned gas flows for automotive engines with variable valves. Moreover, a predictive controller is proposed by using the obtained model. For the engines with variable valves, the intake valve lift enables the quick torque response; on the other hand, the large valves’ overlap may cause a misfiring of combustion bec...

This study presents an experimental investigation of a piston engine driven by compressed air. The compressed air engine was a modified 100 cm 3 internal combustion engine obtained from a motorcycle manufacturer. The experiments in this study used a test bench to examine the power performance and pressure/temperature variations of the compressed air engine at pressures ranging from 5 to 9 bar (...

This work describes the modeling and control of a proposed actuation system that is capable of pressurizing a chamber volume via the catalytic decomposition of a liquid monopropellant controlled by a binary on/off propellant valve. Two design configurations of the actuation system are presented and common portions of both are energetically modeled. The parameters of the resulting dynamic model ...

Using basic physical arguments, we present a design and method for the fabrication of microfluidic valves using multilayer soft lithography. These on-off valves have extremely low actuation pressures and can be used to fabricate active functions, such as pumps and mixers in integrated microfluidic chips. We characterized the performance of the valves by measuring both the actuation pressure and...