Control Technologies For Emerging Micro And Nanoscale Systems

This book comprises a selection of the presentations made at the “Workshop on Dynamics and Control of Micro and Nanoscale Systems” held at IBM Research – Zurich, Switzerland, on the 10th and 11th of December 2009. The aim of the workshop was to bring together some of the leading researchers in the field of dynamics and control of micro- and nanoscale systems. It proved an excellent forum for discussing new ideas and approaches.

Micro/nano-scale engineering—especially the design and implementation of ultra-fast and ultra-scale energy devices, sensors, and cellular and molecular systems—remains a daunting challenge. Modeling and control has played an essential role in many technological breakthroughs throughout the course of history. Therefore, the need for a practical guide to modeling and control for micro/nano-scale devices and systems has emerged. The first edited volume to address this rapidly growing field, Modeling and Control for Micro/Nano Devices and Systems gives control engineers, lab managers, high-tech researchers, and graduate students easy access to the expert contributors’ cutting-edge knowledge of micro/nanotechnology, energy, and bio-systems. The editors offer an integrated view from theory to practice, covering diverse topics ranging from micro/nano-scale sensors to energy devices and control of biology systems in cellular and molecular levels. The book also features numerous case studies for modeling of micro/nano devices and systems, and explains how the models can be used for control and optimization purposes. Readers benefit from learning the latest modeling techniques for micro/nano-scale devices and systems, and then applying those techniques to their own research and development efforts.

Advances in engineering precision have tracked with technological progress for hundreds of years. Over the last few decades, precision engineering has been the specific focus of research on an international scale. The outcome of this effort has been the establishment of a broad range of engineering principles and techniques that form the foundation of precision design. Today’s precision manufacturing machines and measuring instruments represent highly specialised processes that combine deterministic engineering with metrology. Spanning a broad range of technology applications, precision engineering principles frequently bring together scientific ideas drawn from mechanics, materials, optics, electronics, control, thermo-mechanics, dynamics, and software engineering. This book provides a collection of these principles in a single source. Each topic is presented at a level suitable for both undergraduate students and precision engineers in the field. Also included is a wealth of references and example problems to consolidate ideas, and help guide the interested reader to more advanced literature on specific implementations.

This book introduces the state-of-the-art technologies in mechatronics, robotics, and MEMS devices in order to improve their methodologies. It provides a follow-up to "Advanced Mechatronics and MEMS Devices" (2013) with an exploration of the most up-to-date technologies and their applications, shown through examples that give readers insights and lessons learned from actual projects. Researchers on mechatronics, robotics, and MEMS as well as graduate students in mechanical engineering will find chapters on: Fundamental design and working principles on MEMS accelerometers Innovative mobile technologies Force/tactile sensors development Control schemes for reconfigurable robotic systems Inertial microfluidics Piezoelectric force sensors and dynamic calibration techniques ...And more. Authors explore applications in the areas of agriculture, biomedicine, advanced manufacturing, and space. Micro-assembly for current and future industries is also considered, as well as the design and development of micro and intelligent manufacturing.

Increasing complexity and performance and reliability expectations make modeling of automotive system both more difficult and more urgent. Automotive control has slowly evolved from an add-on to classical engine and vehicle design to a key technology to enforce consumption, pollution and safety limits. Modeling, however, is still mainly based on classical methods, even though much progress has been done in the identification community to speed it up and improve it. This book, the product of a workshop of representatives of different communities, offers an insight on how to close the gap and exploit this progress for the next generations of vehicles.

Control from MEMS to Atoms illustrates the use of control and control systems as an essential part of functioning integrated systems. The book is organized according to the dimensional scale of the problem, starting with micro-scale systems and ending with atomic-scale systems. Similar to macro-scale machines and processes, control systems can play a major role in improving the performance of micro- and nano-scale systems and in enabling new capabilities that would otherwise not be possible. However, the majority of problems at these scales present many new challenges that go beyond the current state-of-the-art in control engineering. This is a result of the multidisciplinary nature of micro/nanotechnology, which requires the merging of control engineering with physics, biology and chemistry.

This book describes how surface tension effects can be used by engineers to provide mechanical functions in miniaturized products (1 mm). Even if precursors of this field such as Jurin or Laplace already date back to the 18th century, describing surface tension effects from a mechanical perspective is very recent.brThe originality of this book is to consider the effects of capillary bridges on solids, including forces and torques exerted both statically and dynamically by the liquid along the 6 degrees-of-freedom.brIt provides a comprehensive approach to various applications, such as capillary adhesion (axial force), centering force in packaging and micro-assembly (lateral force) and recent developments such as a capillary motor (torque).

This volume is concerned with the control and dynamics of time delay systems; a research field with at least six-decade long history that has been very active especially in the past two decades. In parallel to the new challenges emerging from engineering, physics, mathematics, and economics, the volume covers several new directions including topology induced stability, large-scale interconnected systems, roles of networks in stability, and new trends in predictor-based control and consensus dynamics. The associated applications/problems are described by highly complex models, and require solving inverse problems as well as the development of new theories, mathematical tools, numerically-tractable algorithms for real-time control. The volume, which is targeted to present these developments in this rapidly evolving field, captures a careful selection of the most recent papers contributed by experts and collected under five parts: (i) Methodology: From Retarded to Neutral Continuous Delay Models, (ii) Systems, Signals and Applications, (iii): Numerical Methods, (iv) Predictor-based Control and Compensation, and (v) Networked Control Systems and Multi-agent Systems.