A system-approach to the elastohydrodynamic lubrication point-contact problem

The classical EHL (elastohydrodynamic lubrication) point contact problem is solved using a new system-approach, similar to that introduced by Houpert and Hamrock for the line-contact problem. Introducing a body-fitted coordinate system, the troublesome free-boundary is transformed to a fixed domain. The Newton-Raphson method can then be used to determine the pressure distribution and the cavitation boundary subject to the Reynolds boundary condition. This method provides an efficient and rigorous way of solving the EHL point contact problem with the aid of a supercomputer and a promising method to deal with the transient EHL point contact problem. A typical pressure distribution and film thickness profile are presented and the minimum film thicknesses are compared with the solution of Hamrock and Dowson. The details of the cavitation boundaries for various operating parameters are discussed

DEVELOPMENT OF A POST-FABRICATION STIFFNESS CHARACTERIZATION TOOL FOR MEMS

Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS) manufacturers face difficulties in characterizing material properties of MEMS post production. Properties such as stiffness can be obtained from simultaneous force and displacement measurements in full-field. We developed a prototype MEMS metrology system that uses a sub-micro Newton resolution force probe operating under a nanometer resolution interferometer to characterize MEMS mechanical properties. FEA simulations and analytical calculations were performed to help determine system constraints and validate results. Precision actuators were integrated and controlled from a developed graphical user interface. The system was tested on an Analog Devices ADXL202 accelerometer

Design and integration of the HARPS3 software system

We present the design of the HARPS3 software system-A distributed, event-driven control system for robotic operation of the HARPS3 spectrograph at the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT). We also describe our approach to integrating the control software components incrementally at various stages of development, using a simulation framework. HARPS3 will be a high resolution (R = 115, 000) echelle spectrograph operating at wavelengths from 380 nm to 690 nm, with a design based on the successful HARPS and HARPS-N instruments. It is being built as part of the Terra Hunting Experiment (THE)-A planned 10 year radial velocity measurement programme to discover Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars

Recent Advances in Computational Methods for the Power Flow Equations

The power flow equations are at the core of most of the computations for designing and operating electric power systems. The power flow equations are a system of multivariate nonlinear equations which relate the power injections and voltages in a power system. A plethora of methods have been devised to solve these equations, starting from Newton-based methods to homotopy continuation and other optimization-based methods. While many of these methods often efficiently find a high-voltage, stable solution due to its large basin of attraction, most of the methods struggle to find low-voltage solutions which play significant role in certain stability-related computations. While we do not claim to have exhausted the existing literature on all related methods, this tutorial paper introduces some of the recent advances in methods for solving power flow equations to the wider power systems community as well as bringing attention from the computational mathematics and optimization communities to the power systems problems. After briefly reviewing some of the traditional computational methods used to solve the power flow equations, we focus on three emerging methods: the numerical polynomial homotopy continuation method, Groebner basis techniques, and moment/sum-of-squares relaxations using semidefinite programming. In passing, we also emphasize the importance of an upper bound on the number of solutions of the power flow equations and review the current status of research in this direction.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to the Tutorial Session at IEEE 2016 American Control Conferenc

Power System State Estimation and Contingency Constrained Optimal Power Flow - A Numerically Robust Implementation

The research conducted in this dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first part provides further improvements in power system state estimation and the second part implements Contingency Constrained Optimal Power Flow (CCOPF) in a stochastic multiple contingency framework. As a real-time application in modern power systems, the existing Newton-QR state estimation algorithms are too slow and too fragile numerically. This dissertation presents a new and more robust method that is based on trust region techniques. A faster method was found among the class of Krylov subspace iterative methods, a robust implementation of the conjugate gradient method, called the LSQR method. Both algorithms have been tested against the widely used Newton-QR state estimator on the standard IEEE test networks. The trust region method-based state estimator was found to be very reliable under severe conditions (bad data, topological and parameter errors). This enhanced reliability justifies the additional time and computational effort required for its execution. The numerical simulations indicate that the iterative Newton-LSQR method is competitive in robustness with classical direct Newton-QR. The gain in computational efficiency has not come at the cost of solution reliability. The second part of the dissertation combines Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP)-based CCOPF with Monte Carlo importance sampling to estimate the operating cost of multiple contingencies. We also developed an LP-based formulation for the CCOPF that can efficiently calculate Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs) under multiple contingencies. Based on Monte Carlo importance sampling idea, the proposed algorithm can stochastically assess the impact of multiple contingencies on LMP-congestion prices