A Magnetorheological Damper with Embedded Piezoelectric Force Sensor: Experiment and Modeling

This chapter describes configuration, fabrication, calibration and performance tests of the devised self-sensing MR damper firstly. Then, a black-box identification approach for modeling the forward and inverse dynamics of the self-sensing MR damper is presented, which is developed with the synthesis of NARX model and neural network within a Bayesian inference framework to have the ability of enhancing generalization.Department of Civil and Environmental Engineerin

The Outer Tracker Detector of the HERA-B Experiment Part I: Detector

The HERA-B Outer Tracker is a large system of planar drift chambers with about 113000 read-out channels. Its inner part has been designed to be exposed to a particle flux of up to 2.10^5 cm^-2 s^-1, thus coping with conditions similar to those expected for future hadron collider experiments. 13 superlayers, each consisting of two individual chambers, have been assembled and installed in the experiment. The stereo layers inside each chamber are composed of honeycomb drift tube modules with 5 and 10 mm diameter cells. Chamber aging is prevented by coating the cathode foils with thin layers of copper and gold, together with a proper drift gas choice. Longitudinal wire segmentation is used to limit the occupancy in the most irradiated detector regions to about 20 %. The production of 978 modules was distributed among six different laboratories and took 15 months. For all materials in the fiducial region of the detector good compromises of stability versus thickness were found. A closed-loop gas system supplies the Ar/CF4/CO2 gas mixture to all chambers. The successful operation of the HERA-B Outer Tracker shows that a large tracker can be efficiently built and safely operated under huge radiation load at a hadron collider.Comment: 28 pages, 14 figure

The Outer Tracker Detector of the HERA-B Experiment. Part II: Front-End Electronics

The HERA-B Outer Tracker is a large detector with 112674 drift chamber channels. It is exposed to a particle flux of up to 2x10^5/cm^2/s thus coping with conditions similar to those expected for the LHC experiments. The front-end readout system, based on the ASD-8 chip and a customized TDC chip, is designed to fulfil the requirements on low noise, high sensitivity, rate tolerance, and high integration density. The TDC system is based on an ASIC which digitizes the time in bins of about 0.5 ns within a total of 256 bins. The chip also comprises a pipeline to store data from 128 events which is required for a deadtime-free trigger and data acquisition system. We report on the development, installation, and commissioning of the front-end electronics, including the grounding and noise suppression schemes, and discuss its performance in the HERA-B experiment

A magnetorheological damper capable of force and displacement sensing

A magnetorheological (MR) damper with embedded force and displacement sensors is devised to facilitate closed-loop structural vibration control. A piezoelectric force sensor and a linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) have been integrated with a conventional MR damping device. The piezoelectric sensor is used to sense the damping force produced by the damper, while the LVDT is employed to measure the displacement of the vibrating structure at the damper location and the movement of the damper piston. Calibration of the piezoelectric force sensor is conducted through force-controlled tests with sinusoidal force excitations of different amplitudes and frequencies. The sensing and damping performances of the devised MR damper are evaluated under displacement-controlled excitations, with different current inputs being commanded to the damper. The experimental results demonstrate reliable displacement/force sensing and controllable damping capabilities of the devised damper. The sensing-while-damping function of the damper hence offers its potential for real-time feedback structural vibration control