Go Brown: Inner-Disciplinary Conjectures

The relationship of society to its excrement is telling at both a cultural and social level. The notion of green architecture with its emphasis on the naturally pure has so far eschewed waste as a primary generative material. Alexandros Tsamis here invokes a more inclusive notion of the environment in which by-product becomes intrinsic to any project. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

(Science) Fiction,Ecophysical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines: Animism,Vitalism and Machinism as a Way to Rearticulate the Need to Confront the Unknown in a Contradictory Manner

François Roche of R&Sie(n) ruminates on the contradictory nature of the present: a time that is ‘vibrating’ while ultimately ‘lacking momentum’. Reclaiming ‘the scenarios and substances that condition architecture’, he rejects the large-scale flights of fancy of international signature architects and argues for the reactivation of ‘a throbbing, complex and unfinished “localism”’. In so doing, he advocates a machinism that enables fictionalisation and speculation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Encoding Material

Gramazio & Kohler's work in the faculty of Architecture and Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich is renowned for its pioneering work with industrial robots. Here, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler and Silvan Oesterle describe how the integration of fabrication-relevant decisions into encoded designs enables the control of complex interactions between material elements and facilitates the direct generation of machine data, as epitomised by their West Fest Pavilion project. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimisation and Evaluation of La0.6Sr0.4CoO3 – δ Cathode for Intermediate Temperature Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

In this work, La_0.6Sr_0.4CoO_{3 – δ}/Ce_{1 – x}Gd_xO_{2 – δ} (LSC/GDC) composite cathodes are investigated for SOFC application at intermediate temperatures, especially below 700 °C. The symmetrical cells are prepared by spraying LSC/GDC composite cathodes on a GDC tape, and the lowest polarisation resistance (R_p) of 0.11 Ω cm² at 700 °C is obtained for the cathode containing 30 wt.‐% GDC. For the application on YSZ electrolyte, symmetrical LSC cathodes are fabricated on a YSZ tape coated on a GDC interlayer. The impact of the sintering temperature on the microstructure and electrochemical properties is investigated. The optimum temperature is determined to be 950 °C; the corresponding R_p of 0.24 Ω cm² at 600 °C and 0.06 Ω cm² at 700 °C are achieved, respectively. An YSZ‐based anode‐supported solid oxide fuel cell is fabricated by employing LSC/GDC composite cathode sintered at 950 °C. The cell with an active electrode area of 4 × 4 cm² exhibits the maximum power density of 0.42 W cm^–2 at 650 °C and 0.54 W cm^–2 at 700 °C. More than 300 h operating at 650 °C is carried out for an estimate of performance and degradation of a single cell. Despite a decline at the beginning, the stable performance during the later term suggests a potential application.     

Cultivar variation in response of strawberry fruit to high carbon dioxide treatments

The influence of cultivar on responses of strawberry fruit to 20 kPa CO₂ or air storage at 2 °C was measured for 7 days. CO₂ storage increased firmness of all cultivars over air storage, but the degree of increase was affected by cultivar and days in storage. CO₂‐treated fruit were lighter colored and less intensely red than air‐treated fruit. Accumulations of acetaldehyde, ethanol and ethyl acetate in CO₂‐treated fruit were strongly affected by cultivar, with those in ‘Annapolis’ having the lowest and those in ‘Governor Simcoe’ having the highest concentrations. Genetic variation in this response provides useful material for investigating the metabolic basis of CO₂ effects in strawberry fruit. © 1999 Society of Chemical Industry     

H ∞ control for discrete‐time nonlinear Markov jump systems with multiplicative noise and sector constraint

This paper addresses the finite horizon H _∞ control problem for a class of discrete‐time nonlinear Markov jump systems with multiplicative noise and nonlinear feedback device. The system nonlinearity occurs in a random way specified by a Bernoulli process, whereas the actuator and sensor nonlinearities are restricted to a sector region. Both the state and the dynamic output feedback H _∞ controllers are devised in terms of difference LMIs. The proposed approach not only allows the resulting system to achieve a prescribed disturbance attenuation level, but also enables the output of actuator/sensor to meet the designated sector condition. Moreover, it is also shown that our approach is well‐adapted for dealing with the discrete‐time Markov jump systems with saturated actuator and sensor. Finally, a backward iterative algorithm is provided to solve the obtained difference LMIs and a numerical example is presented to verify the efficiency of the theoretical results. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Observer‐based H ∞ output tracking control for networked control systems

This paper is concerned with observer‐based H _∞ output tracking control for networked control systems. An observer‐based controller is implemented through a communication network to drive the output of a controlled plant to track the output of a reference model. The inputs of the controlled plant and the observer‐based tracking controller are updated in an asynchronous way because of the effects of network‐induced delays and packet dropouts in the controller‐to‐actuator channel. Taking the asynchronous characteristic into consideration, the resulting closed‐loop system is modeled as a system with two interval time‐varying delays. A Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, which makes use of information about the lower and upper bounds of the interval time‐varying delays, is constructed to derive a delay‐dependent criterion such that the closed‐loop system has a desired H _∞ tracking performance. Notice that a separation principle cannot be used to design an observer gain and a control gain due to the asynchronous inputs of the plant and the controller. Instead, a novel design algorithm is proposed by applying a particle swarm optimization technique with the feasibility of the stability criterion to search for the minimum H _∞ tracking performance and the corresponding gains. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by an example. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stability,L2‐gain and asynchronous H ∞ control for continuous‐time switched systems

This paper is concerned with the stability and L₂‐gain problems for a class of continuous‐time linear switched systems with the existed asynchronous behaviors, where ‘asynchronous’ means that the switching of the controllers to be designed has a lag to the switching of the system modes. Firstly, a new sufficient condition on the asymptotic stability and weighted L₂‐gain analysis is obtained by using multiple Lyapunov functions combined with the average dwell time technique. Moreover, a result that is formulated in form of linear matrix inequalities is derived for the problem of asynchronous H _∞ control. Based on the result, the mode‐dependent controllers can be designed. Finally, an illustrative numerical example is presented to show the effectiveness of the obtained results.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Finite‐time H ∞ control for discrete‐time switched nonlinear systems with time delay

In this paper, the problem of finite‐time H _∞ control is addressed for a class of discrete‐time switched nonlinear systems with time delay. The concept of H _∞ finite‐time boundedness is first introduced for discrete‐time switched delay systems. Next, a set of switching signals are designed by using the average dwell time approach, under which some delay‐dependent sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the H _∞ finite‐time boundedness of the closed‐loop system. Then, a finite‐time H _∞ state feedback controller is also designed by solving such conditions. Furthermore, the problem of uniform finite‐time H _∞ stabilization is also resolved. All the conditions are cast into linear matrix inequalities, which can be easily checked by using recently developed algorithms for solving linear matrix inequalities. A numerical example and a water‐quality control system are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the main results. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Some results on disturbance attenuation for Hamiltonian systems via direct discrete‐time design

The disturbance attenuation and robust disturbance attenuation problems for Hamiltonian systems in the discrete‐time setting are considered and some new results are presented. The new results are derived utilizing the recently presented dissipativity equality obtained by adding the dissipation rate function to the classical dissipativity inequality. A selection of the dissipation rate function yields new results. These results include a condition on the dissipation structure of the system to achieve the desired disturbance attenuation level and gives direct construction of optimal control laws for any desired disturbance attenuation level. The results remove the need to solve Hamilton–Jacobi–Isaacs inequalities. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.