Charge reduction and regeneration in K+, Na+, Mg2+, Ni2+ and Co2+-exchanged Wyoming Bentonite

Controlled calcination of ion-exchanged Wyoming Bentonite in the presence and absence of ammonia leads to layer charge reductions. Detailed chemical analyses of both unexchangeable and exchangeable species lead to the conclusion that in no case is there migration of the original interlamellar cations into the octahedral region of the layers although, in terms of ionic radius alone, Mg²⁺, Ni²⁺ and, possibly Co²⁺, might be expected to do so. The production of unexchangeable Mg, Ni or Co, is identified as resulting from high temperature hydrolysis leading to hydroxide or oxide formation.     

Stochastically resilient extended Kalman filtering for discrete-time nonlinear systems with sensor failures

Missing sensor data is a common problem, which severely influences the overall performance of modern data-intensive control and computing applications. In order to address this important issue, a novel resilient extended Kalman filter is proposed for discrete-time nonlinear stochastic systems with sensor failures and random observer gain perturbations. The failure mechanisms of multiple sensors are assumed to be independent of each other with different failure rates. The locally unbiased robust minimum mean square filter is designed for state estimation under these conditions. The performance of the proposed estimation method is verified by means of numerical Monte Carlo simulation of two different nonlinear stochastic systems, involving a sinusoidal system and a Lorenz oscillator system.     

Controlling aliased dynamics in motion systems? An identification for sampled-data control approach

Sampled-data control systems occasionally exhibit aliased resonance phenomena within the control bandwidth. The aim of this paper is to investigate the aspect of these aliased dynamics with application to a high performance industrial nano-positioning machine. This necessitates a full sampled-data control design approach, since these aliased dynamics endanger both the at-sample performance and the intersample behaviour. The proposed framework comprises both system identification and sampled-data control. In particular, the sampled-data control objective necessitates models that encompass the intersample behaviour, i.e., ideally continuous time models. Application of the proposed approach on an industrial wafer stage system provides a thorough insight and new control design guidelines for controlling aliased dynamics.     

Analysis of a large number of Markov chains competing for transitions

We consider the behaviour of a stochastic system composed of several identically distributed, but non independent, discrete-time absorbing Markov chains competing at each instant for a transition. The competition consists in determining at each instant, using a given probability distribution, the only Markov chain allowed to make a transition. We analyse the first time at which one of the Markov chains reaches its absorbing state. When the number of Markov chains goes to infinity, we analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the system for an arbitrary probability mass function governing the competition. We give conditions that ensure the existence of the asymptotic distribution and we show how these results apply to cluster-based distributed storage when the competition is handled using a geometric distribution.     

Finite-time consensus of multiple second-order dynamic agents without velocity measurements

This article considers the finite-time consensus of multiple second-order dynamic agents without velocity measurements. A feasible protocol under which each agent can only obtain the measurements of its position relative to its neighbours is proposed. By applying the graph theory, Lyapunov theory and the homogeneous domination method, some sufficient conditions for finite-time consensus of second-order multi-agent systems are established under the different kinds of communication topologies. Some examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.     

Enhanced utilization bound of Rate-Monotonic scheduling in Controller Area Networks

When priorities to message streams are assigned using Rate Monotonic (RM) for a Controller Area Network (CAN), the utilization bound is known to be about 25% for CAN 2.0A and 29% for CAN 2.0B. In this letter, we present a higher utilization bound than the existing ones with a reasonable constraint. The new utilization bounds are approximately 34% for CAN 2.0A and 41% for CAN 2.0B if no single message stream's utilization exceeds 46% or 27% of the total utilization for CAN 2.0A or CAN 2.0B, respectively.     

Sliding mode control for Markov jump linear uncertain systems with partly unknown transition rates

In this paper, based on sliding mode control approach, the robust stabilisation problem for a class of continuous-time Markovian jump linear uncertain systems with partly unknown transition rates is investigated. The transition rate matrix under consideration covers completely known, boundary known and completely unknown elements. By making use of linear matrix inequalities technique, sufficient conditions are presented to derive the linear switching surface and guarantee the stochastic stability of sliding mode dynamics. Then a sliding mode control law is designed to drive the state trajectory of the closed-loop system to the specified linear switching surface in finite time in spite of the existing uncertainties and unknown transition rates. Finally, an example is given to verify the validity of the theoretical results.     

A parametric frequency response method for non-linear time-varying systems

A new parametric frequency response algorithm is introduced to investigate linear and non-linear dynamic systems with time-varying parameters. In the new algorithm the time-varying parameters are regarded as additional inputs of the systems and the non-linear generalised frequency response functions for multi-input-single-output systems are then employed to obtain Zadeh's system functions from a differential equation representation. The parametric frequency response method reveals how the time-varying parameters affect the behaviour of the systems through a time-varying term. The new method can be applied to both linear and non-linear time-varying systems.