University of Southampton OCS (beta)

Professor Roger Goodall

Plenary Session Title: Motion and vibration control for railway vehicles

Active control of the dynamic characteristics of railway vehicles provides important possibilities for enhanced performance, and is applicable to a variety of vehicle systems: to the secondary suspension for improving ride quality, to the running gear on the bogies for enhanced dynamic characteristics, also to the pantographs which are used to collect electrical power from the overhead wires. The paper will provide an overview of the opportunities and requirements for each application, illustrate them with examples and identify key research challenges. It will conclude with a vision for the design of future railway vehicles and their operation if the full range of motion and vibration control opportunities are exploited.

Roger Goodall spent 14 years in industrial research before he took up an academic position at Loughborough University, where he is currently Professor of Control Systems Engineering. He is also a part-time professor in the Institute of Railway Research at the University of Huddersfield. His research is concerned with a variety of practical applications of advanced control, usually for high performance electro-mechanical systems. Specific projects are concerned with active railway vehicle suspensions, advanced sensor systems for aircraft flight control systems, and advanced concepts for control technology in general. His projects are characterised by strong industrial collaboration, having worked with companies such as Alstom, BAE Systems, Bombardier Transportation, and this is supported by excellent links with universities and research organizations worldwide.

He has served in a variety of external roles such as member of the Board of the International Association for Vehicle System Dynamics (IAVSD), Vice-President of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), chairman of the IMechE Railway Division, inaugural Chair of the Technical Committee on Mechatronic Systems for IFAC and Chairman of the UK Automatic Control Council (UKACC). For services to IFAC he has received the Federation’s Outstanding Service Award, and has also been elected as an IFAC Advisor. He has been a Fellow of both the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the UK for a number of years, and has received a number of awards from both these and other institutions for his published work. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2007.

Professor Takeshi Mizuno

Plenary Session Title: Recent advances in magnetic suspension technology

Abstract:

The suspension of an object with no visible means is still fascinating to most people. Magnetic suspension utilizes magnetic force for achieving such suspension. There is no contact between stator and object (floator). No mechanical friction and wear is expected in operation even without lubrication. This advantage has already given rise to a lot of industrial applications such as Maglev system, and active magnetic bearing (AMB) for complete contact-free suspension of rotating object. The most successful application is turbo machinery such as turbo-molecular pump.

 

Researches and developments on magnetic suspension have been actively pursued for several decades and some people may consider this technology to be rather mature now. However, to fully utilize this unique technology and to increase industrial applications, technical advances are still important.

This report presents several recent innovations and advances in magnetic suspension technology. An overview of technological fundamentals is presented first, which is followed by reports on the recent works of the author.

Takeshi Mizuno is a Professor and the Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering, Saitama University in Saitama, Japan. He received the B.E., M.E., and D.E. degrees from the University of Tokyo in 1978, 1980 and 1985, respectively. He was a Research Associate at the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo from 1980 to 1985, and an Assistant Professor at the Polytech University from 1985 to 1988. Since 1988, he has been with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Saitama University. He stayed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich as a gust professor from November in 1990 to October in 1991.

His research interests include control engineering, mechatronics, magnetic and electrostatic suspension, magnetic bearing, active vibration control, vibration isolation, dynamic vibration absorber, micromanipulation and micro-assembly systems, and instruments for measuring mass and force.

He has received Outstanding Paper Award from the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), 1998 and 2006, Outstanding Paper Award from the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME), 2004 and 2012, Best Paper Award from the Japan Society of Applied Electromagnetics and Mechanics (JSAEM), 2006 and 2014, The 2008 Annual Dynamics, Measurement and Control Division Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Advancement of Division Activities, 2009, The 2010 Annual Dynamics, Measurement and Control Division Award for International Activity, 2011, and AEM Chairperson-ship Award from JSAEM, 2012.

He organized the Sixth International Conference on Motion and Vibration Control (6th MOVIC), the Eleventh International Symposium on Magnetic Bearings (ISMB-11) and the Twentieth Magnetodynamics (MAGDA) Conference in Pacific Asia as a Chairperson.

Professor Kevin Murphy

Kevin Murphy is a professor and department chairman of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Louisville. He earned his bachelors and masters degree from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Michigan. He then earned a Ph.D. from Duke University. He has been a professor at the University of Nebraska and the University of Connecticut, prior to moving to Louisville in 2013.

His research has primarily been in nonlinear dynamics, vibrations and stability of structural systems. Applications include manufacturing problems, aircraft structures, micro- electromechanical systems - as well as some less traditional areas, including tree vibrations (botany) and emergent scaling in materials. This work has been funded the by National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Air Force, and NASA. Much of his current work has focused around structural health monitoring, where he and his collaborators marry structural models with experimental data and probabilistic methods to arrive at damage parameter estimates. He has published widely in these areas and has recently co-authored book entitled: Modeling and Estimation of Damage in Structures.

Professor David Wagg

Plenary Session Title: Reducing vibrations in structures using structural control

Abstract:

Reducing vibrations in structures using structural control In this presentation three recent developments in structural dynamics which can be used to reduce vibrations will be discussed. All three have the objective of reducing unwanted vibrations in structures. The first is the “tuned-inerter-damper” concept that is analogous to a tuned-mass-damper, but replaces the mass with an inerter. The inerter is an acceleration driven device that has been developed relatively recently. It’s main application area has been the automotive industry, but a much wider variety of applications are currently being investigated. We will present experimental and theoretical results showing how the inerter behaviour can be exploited to reduce structural vibrations. The potential advantages of the tuned-inerter-damper will also be discussed. The second topic discussed in this talk is the combination of active and semi-active control. In this scenario, the active actuator is used to help “assist” the semi-active actuator. The control is implemented using a immersion and invariance control technique, and has applications to railway pantograph systems. The third and final example we will discuss is the idea of using nonlinear spring stiffness to create a lightweight vibration isolator. The nonlinear spring is formed by combining a linear spring with a bistable composite plate. This application is used to increase the isolation effect that can be obtained using just linear stiffnss by creating a nonlinear stiffness function. The concept is sometimes called the “high static low dynamic stiffness” spring. We present numerical and experimental results which show how the transmissibility of the system is improved by designing the nonlinear spring as part of an isolation mount.

David Wagg was awarded his BEng degree and PhD (at the Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics) from University College London. From 1998 until 2000 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre at the University of Bristol.

In 2000 he was appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bristol and he became Professor there in 2008. From 2004-2009 he was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow. In July 2013 he moved to the University of Sheffield to take up a chair in Nonlinear Dynamics.

Professor Wagg's research is focused on understanding and controlling nonlinear structural dynamics. He is currently PI for the £4.2M EPSRC funded Engineering Nonlinearity Programme Grant, which is a consortium of five universities and eight industrial partners. He has published extensively in the topic area including the book Nonlinear Vibration with Control (Springer, 2009), which is one of the first to describe using nonlinear modelling and control for structural dynamics.

Professor Kon-Well Wang

Plenary Session Title: From Muscles to Plants – Nature-Inspired Adaptive Metastructures for Structural Dynamics Enhancement

Abstract:

During the past few decades, due to the advances in materials, electronics, and system integration technologies, structural dynamics and controls researchers in various engineering disciplines (e.g., aerospace, civil, mechanical) have been investigating the feasibility of creating adaptive structures. The vision is to develop multifunctional structural systems that have various embedded and distributed autonomous functionalities, such as shape reconfiguration and morphing, materials and mechanical property variations, energy harvesting, vibration and stability controls, and health monitoring and healing. From a structural system point of view, one of the major challenges is on how to best synthesize the cross-field and local-global coupling characteristics of the various adaptive materials and elements to optimize the overall structure performance. It has been recognized that to achieve significant new advances in adaptive structures, researchers have to conduct even more cross talks among various fields and disciplines. In recent years, interesting approaches have been explored to develop mechanical metastructures based on synergistic modular architectures, often observed in nature, such as in biological or atomistic systems. This presentation will discuss some of the recent interdisciplinary research efforts in synthesizing nature-inspired adaptive metastructures for structural dynamics enhancement and applications.

Kon-Well Wang is the Stephen P. Timoshenko Professor and Tim Manganello/BorgWarner Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, MI, U.S.A. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985, worked at the General Motors Research Labs as a Senior Research Engineer, and started his academic career at the Pennsylvania State University in 1988. During his Penn State years, Professor Wang has served as the William E. Diefenderfer Chaired Professor in Mechanical Engineering, Director of the Structural Dynamics and Controls Lab, Associate Director of the Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence, and Group Leader for the Center for Acoustics and Vibration. Dr. Wang joined the University of Michigan in 2008.

Professor Wang’s main technical interests are in adaptive structural systems and structural dynamics & controls. He has received various recognitions for his accomplishments; such as the SPIE Smart Structures and Materials Lifetime Achievement Award, the ASME Adaptive Structures and Materials Systems Award, the ASME N.O. Myklestad Award, the ASME Rudolf Kalman Award, the ASME Adaptive Structures and Material Systems Best Paper Award, the NASA Tech Brief Award, the SAE Ralph Teetor Award, the PSES Premier Research Award, and the PSES Outstanding Teaching Award. Professor Wang is a Fellow of the ASME, AAAS, and IOP. He has chaired the ASME Technical Committee on Vibration and Sound and various ASME standing committees. He has been the Publication Executive of the ASME Design Engineering Division Executive Committee and the Chair of the ASME Mechanical Engineering Department Heads Executive Committee. Professor Wang has served as the Chief Editor for the ASME Journal of Vibration and Acoustics. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures and an Editorial Advisory Board Member for the Journal of Sound and Vibration.