High Speed Model Implementation and Inversion Techniques for Smart Material Transducers

by Braun, Thomas R.

Smart material transducers are utilized in wide range of applications, including nanopositioning, fluid pumps, high accuracy, high speed milling, objects, vibration control and/or suppression, and artificial muscles. They are attractive because the resulting devices are solid-state and often very compact. However, the coupling of field or temperature tomechanical deformation, which makes these materials effective transducers, also introduces hysteresis and time-dependent behaviors that must be accommodated in device designs and models before the full potential of compounds can be realized. In this dissertation, we present highly efficient modeling techniques to characterize hysteresis and constitutive nonlinearities in ferroelectric, ferromagnetic, and shape memory alloy compounds and model inversion techniques which permit subsequent linear control designs.