Loads Simulator System for Testing and Qualification of Flight Actuators

The flight actuation system plays important role in the accurate guidance of the flight vehicles. The actuators driving the control surfaces are aerodynamically loaded during flight. The design, testing and selection process of the flight actuators play important role to ensure the stable and safe flight. Since a reliable flight actuation system can ensure appropriate guidance, the importance of qualification process cannot be neglected. Qualification of the actuators through field trials is a very costly and time-consuming process. The testing process using real flights takes more time and is costly. For ground testing, aerodynamic loading systems are used. The aerodynamic loading system is ground-based hardware in the loop (HWIL) simulator that can be used for exerting aerodynamic loads on actuation system of flight vehicles in real-time experiment. The actuation system under test is directly connected to the loading motor through a stiff shaft and the aerodynamics loading is applied in real time according to the flight trajectory generated by a flight computer

Improving the hardware complexity by exploiting the reduced dynamics-based fractional order systems

Fractional calculus is nding increased usage in the modeling and control of nonlinear systems with the enhanced robustness. However, from the implementation perspectives, the simultaneous modeling of the systems and the design of controllers with fractional-order operators can bring additional advantages. In this paper, a fractional order model of a nonlinear system along with its controller design and its implementation on a eld programmable gate array (FPGA) is undertaken as a case study. Overall, three variants of the controllers are designed, including classical sliding mode controller, fractional controller for an integer model of the plant, and a fractional controller for a fractional model of the plant (FCFP). A high-level synthesis approach is used to map all the variants of the controllers on FPGA. The integro-differential fractional operators are realized with in nite impulse response lters architecturally implemented as cascaded secondorder sections to withstand quantization effects introduced by xed-point computations necessary for FPGA implementations. The experimental results demonstrate that the fractional order sliding mode controllerbased on fractional order plant (FCFP) exhibits reduced dynamics in sense of fractional integration and differentials. It is further veri ed that the FCFP is as robust as the classical sliding mode with comparable performance and computational resources

Role of Pakistan poverty alleviation fund's micro credit in poverty alleviation: a case of Pakistan

Poverty alleviation has been one of the major agenda of all civilized societies throughout the history. Different strategies have been adopted in Pakistan for the purpose, which include special programs and short-term measures targeted towards improving the earning capacity of masses and provision of social safety nets for the really poor. With a view to enhance the access of the low-income communities to socio-economic services, the Government of Pakistan has set up an independent and professionally managed unit, the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF). The Fund is working through a network of partner organizations having strong community outreach programs. PPAF continuously monitors and analyzes effectiveness of its programs. This paper attempts to quantify the impact of PPAF micro credit on poverty alleviation.. Data collected in Gallup (2005) has been utilized for the purpose. Counter-factual ‘Combined approach’ has been employed in the analysis. The Paper concludes that Micro credit has reduced poverty by 3.05 percentage points in the period under stud

Tensile strength of woven yarn kenaf fiber reinforced polyester composites

This paper presents the tensile strength of woven kenaf fiber reinforced polyester composites. The as-received yarn kenaf fiber is weaved and then aligned into specific fiber orientations before it is hardened with polyester resin. The composite plates are shaped according to the standard geometry and uni-axially loaded in order to investigate the tensile responses. Two important parameters are studied such as fiber orientations and number of layers. According to the results, it is shown that fiber orientations greatly affected the ultimate tensile strength but it is not for modulus of elasticity for both types of layers. It is estimated that the reductions of both ultimate tensile strength and Young’s modulus are in the range of 27.7-30.9% and 2.4-3.7% respectively, if the inclined fibers are used with respect to the principal axis

Adaptive fractional order terminal sliding mode control of a doubly fed induction generator- based wind energy system

The dynamic model of a doubly fed induction generator (DFIG)-based wind energy system is subjected to nonlinear dynamics, uncertainties, and external disturbances. In the presence of such nonlinear effects, a high-performance control system is required to guarantee the smooth and maximum power transfer from the wind energy system to the ac grids. This paper proposes a novel fractional order adaptive terminal sliding mode control system for both the rotor and grid side converters of the DFIG system. The stability of the closed loop is ensured using the fractional order Lyapunov theorem. Numerical results are presented to show the superiority of the proposed control method over the classical sliding mode control system and the proportional integral controllers

Analysis and verification of leakage inductance calculation in DAB converters based on high-frequency toroidal transformers under different design scenarios

High-frequency transformers are becoming an essential component in the integration of power resources that rely on power electronic converters; their efficiency and performance are influenced by parasitic characteristics in the interface. In this article, the design of a high-frequency toroidal transformer has been explained in detail using the ANSYS Maxwell platform. Various parameters, such as leakage inductance, magnetic flux density, magnetic field strength and uniform magnetic flux line are analyzed using Finite element analysis. High-frequency transformers using a toroidal core with different winding configurations are examined and all parameters obtained through simulation are validated by an analytical approach. Analysis of each design is based on its leakage inductances, which will aid in the appropriate selection of transformers as a function of their operating frequency. This analysis is expected to guide designers to optimize the high-frequency transformer parameters based on practical applications. The optimized parameters are then applied for a dual active bridge (DAB) converter within MATLAB/Simulink to verify the design process. A prototype has been built to validate the simulation and design procedure. The results obtained from both simulation and experiments are compared and show great correlation

Static Var Compensator with Fractional Order Dynamics for Enhanced Stability and Control

This chapter presents a new theoretical approach for a novel static Var compensator (SVC) system using fractional order calculus. The thyristor-controlled reactor (TCR) and fixed capacitor are assumed to be noninteger. A state space model is derived for the fractional SVC and a novel fractional order sliding surface is proposed, based on which a fractional order controller is derived for bus voltage stabilization with variable loading. Keeping in view the enhanced stability margins of the system, the parameters of the control system are optimized using Simulink response optimization toolbox. The stability and the convergence proof of the control system is verified using fractional order Lyapunov theorem. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified using numerical simulations

VR-ZYCAP: A versatile resourse-level ICAP controller for ZYNQ SOC

This article belongs to the Special Issue Architecture and CAD for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)Hybrid architectures integrating a processor with an SRAM-based FPGA fabric—for example, Xilinx ZynQ SoC—are increasingly being used as a single-chip solution in several market segments to replace multi-chip designs. These devices not only provide advantages in terms of logic density, cost and integration, but also provide run-time in-field reconfiguration capabilities. However, the current reconfiguration capabilities provided by vendor tools are limited to the module level. Therefore, incremental run-time configuration memory changes require a lengthy compilation time for off-line bitstream generation along with storage and reconfiguration time overheads with traditional vendor methodologies. In this paper, an internal configuration access port (ICAP) controller that provides a versatile fine-grain resource-level incremental reconfiguration of the programmable logic (PL) resources in ZynQ SoC is presented. The proposed controller implemented in PL, called VR-ZyCAP, can reconfigure look-up tables (LUTs) and Flip-Flops (FF). The run-time reconfiguration of FF is achieved through a reset after reconfiguration (RAR)-featured partial bitstream to avoid the unintended state corruption of other memory elements. Along with versatility, our proposed controller improves the reconfiguration time by 30 times for FFs compared to state-of-the-art works while achieving a nearly 400-fold increase in speed for LUTs when compared to vendor-supported software approaches. In addition, it achieves competitive resource utilization when compared to existing approaches.This research was funded by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the ACHILLES project, grant number PID2019-104207RB-I00 and by Taif University Researchers Supporting fund, grant number (TURSP-2020/144), Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia