Analysis of composite laminates with transverse cracks

The analysis of the behaviour of composite laminates with general balanced lay-up sequences and containing distributed transverse cracks is discussed and demonstrated in this paper. It is shown that a constitutive model of damage for composites, which has been successfully used to analyse the effects of uniformly distributed transverse cracks in cross-ply laminates, can be readily extended to the analysis of uniformly distributed transverse cracks in more general symmetric laminates. The further extension of the theory to non-uniformly distributed damage can be achieved by finite element analysis. It is shown that the finite element implementation of the theory is particularly simple since the contribution of the damage to the overall behaviour can be incorporated into the force vectors.     

Influence of lips on thin-walled sections

Turning the free edge of an unstiffened flange inwards or outwards to form a ‘lip’, can substantially improve the local buckling resistance of a member. The lip is the most common type of edge stiffener used in cold-rolled, thin-walled sections. In this paper the behaviour of plate elements of thin-walled sections stiffened by compound lips (i.e. lips which are folded twice to form ‘lips on the lips’) is examined both theoretically and experimentally. An outline of a series of tests on compound edge-stiffened thin-walled sections of various geometries is given and some load-end compression displacement paths are compared with the theoretical predictions. Reasonably good agreement is obtained between the experimental and theoretical results. Comparisons of the theoretical predictions with experimental results of other researchers are also presented in this paper.     

Application of the recurrent multilayer perceptron in modelingcomplex process dynamics

A nonlinear dynamic model is developed for a process system, namely a heat exchanger, using the recurrent multilayer perceptron network as the underlying model structure. The perceptron is a dynamic neural network, which appears effective in the input-output modeling of complex process systems. Dynamic gradient descent learning is used to train the recurrent multilayer perceptron, resulting in an order of magnitude improvement in convergence speed over a static learning algorithm used to train the same network. In developing the empirical process model the effects of actuator, process, and sensor noise on the training and testing sets are investigated. Learning and prediction both appear very effective, despite the presence of training and testing set noise, respectively. The recurrent multilayer perceptron appears to learn the deterministic part of a stochastic training set, and it predicts approximately a moving average response of various testing sets. Extensive model validation studies with signals that are encountered in the operation of the process system modeled, that is steps and ramps, indicate that the empirical model can substantially generalize operational transients, including accurate prediction of instabilities not in the training set. However, the accuracy of the model beyond these operational transients has not been investigated. Furthermore, online learning is necessary during some transients and for tracking slowly varying process dynamics. Neural networks based empirical models in some cases appear to provide a serious alternative to first principles models.     

A novel phase noise reduction technique in oscillators usingdefected ground structure

A new technique to reduce the phase noise in microwave oscillators is developed using the resonant characteristic of the defected ground structure (DGS). Two kinds of oscillators have been designed and measured for the examination of the reduction of phase noise by the DGS. The first adopts the DGS section under the microstrip line at the gate circuit, while the second has only the conventional microstrip line. Measurement shows reduced phase noise by 10-15 dB in the oscillator with the DGS compared to the conventional one     

Damaged layer characteristics in micro-endmilling of copper using an ultrahigh-speed air spindle

This paper presents an investigation on the characteristics of damaged layer in micro-machining by using the ultrahigh-speed air spindle. The damaged layer in metal cutting is derived from plastic deformation and transformation of metal structure. In this study, micro-cutting force, surface roughness, and plastic deformation layer according to the variation of machining conditions were investigated by experiments. The damaged layer was measured using optical microscope for the samples prepared by metallographic techniques. Its scale was dependent on cutting process parameters, especially feed per tooth. According to experimental results, it was verified that the thickness of damaged layer was increased with increasing of feed per tooth and cutting depth, also thickness of damaged layer was reduced in down-milling compared to upmilling during micro-endmilling operation.     

Minimum-Energy Translational Trajectory Generation for Differential-Driven Wheeled Mobile Robots

Mobile robots can be used in many applications, such as exploration, search and rescue, reconnaissance, security, and cleaning. Mobile robots usually carry batteries as their energy source and their operational time is restricted by the finite energy available from the batteries. Therefore, energy constraints are critical to the service time of mobile robots. This paper investigates the minimum-energy control problem for translational trajectory generation, which minimizes the energy drawn from the batteries. Optimal control theory is used to find the optimal velocity trajectory in analytic form. To demonstrate energy efficiency obtainable, we performed simulations of minimum-energy velocity control and compared the results with loss-minimization control and energy-optimal trapezoidal velocity profiles. Simulation results showed that significant energy savings can be achieved, of up to 9% compared with loss-minimization control and up to 10% compared with energy-optimal trapezoidal velocity profile. We also performed an actual robot experiment using Pioneer 3-AT platform to show the validity of the proposed minimum-energy velocity control. The experimental results revealed that the proposed minimum-energy velocity control can save the battery energy up to 10% compared with loss-minimization control. Categories (3): Robot control, (5): RobotMotion Planning     

An accurate and practical buffer allocation model for the buffer cache based on marginal gains

A new dynamic buffer allocation strategy based on the notion of marginal gains is presented for the buffer cache that is used by the operating system to store frequently accessed disk blocks in main memory, and the performance of the proposed strategy is compared with those of previous allocation strategies. In the proposed strategy, marginal gain values are predicted by exploiting functions that approximate the expected number of buffer hits per unit time. Experimental results from both trace-driven simulation and an actual implementation in the FreeBSD operating system show that the proposed strategy accurately predicts the marginal gain values for various workloads resulting in significantly improved buffer hit ratios.