Universality of Non-classical Approaches in Mechatronics
from Physics to Smart Structures
The past decades have marked significant progress in bringing together different areas of research to achieve technological advances. Mechatronics and Smart Structures are two research areas demonstrating these achievements. Both research fields share similar goals - i.e. to develop adaptive structures with desirable functions through intelligent behaviour - and apply multidisciplinary research to achieve these goals. The latest addition to these developments is related to functional materials. Physics, chemistry and various areas of engineering are brought together to design and develop new materials with pre-defined physical parameters and functionality. All these developments offer new exciting applications but also pose many challenges to designers. New materials and hybrid-based designs are often associated with non-stationarity, non-linearity and ambiguity when system responses are analysed. The design and control complexity of such systems is often a barrier that prevents promising research outcomes from transferring to the marketplace. Finding an unconventional or non-classical solution could help to overcome this barrier. Two different approaches can be used to achieve this.
Taking advantage of undesired phenomena is one of the possible approaches. Non-linearities are usually undesired phenomena. Structural design often exploits nonlinear bahaviour and deliberately includes nonlinear effects. For example, in mechanical engineering, effective damping devices are based on highly non-linear effects such as friction or solid-fluid interactions. In control engineering, structural vibrations can be suppressed effectively by introducing designed nonlinearities to the system. In smart structures, energy harvesting can be improved when vibration and piezoelectric nonlinear effects are used. Looking outside boundaries is the second possible approach used to overcome difficult research problems. The ability to see the problem from a new research perspective is often fundamental to creating breakthroughs in science and engineering.
The project revolves around Mechatronics and Smart Structures & Materials not only to demonstrate unconventional and non-classical approaches to selected problems but also to show universality of these approaches in other areas of science and engineering. The project investigates a portfolio of new multidisciplinary research problems combining theoretical physics, material science and engineering.
Project manager
DSc, PhD, MSc, FIoP, FIMechE
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
