Teleoperation systems have been used in the operating rooms for more than a decade. However, the lack of force feedback in commercially available systems still raises safety issues and forbids surgical gestures like palpation. Although force feedback has already been implemented in experimental setups, a systematic methodology is still lacking to design the control laws. The approach developed in this thesis is a contribution towards such a systematic methodology: it combines the use of disturbance observers with the use of a structured fixed-order controller. This approach is validated by experiments performed on a one degree of freedom teleoperation system. A physical model of this system is proposed and validated experimentally. Disturbance observers allow to compensate friction, which is responsible for performance degradation in teleoperation. Contrary to alternative approaches,they are based on a model of the frictionless mechanical system. This allows to compensate friction with a time varying behavior, which occurs in laparoscopy. Parametric uncertainties in this model may lead to an unstable closed-loop. A kind of "separation principle" is provided to decouple the design of the closed-loop system from the design of the observer. It relies on a modified problem statement and on the use of available robust design and analysis tools. A new metric is proposed to evaluate the performance of friction compensation systems experimentally. This metric evaluates the ability of a compensation system to linearize a motion system, irrespective of the task and as a function of frequency. The observer-based friction compensation is evaluated with respect to this new metric and to a task-based metric. It correctly attenuates the friction in the bandwidth of interest and significantly improves position and force tracking during a palpation task. Structured fixed-order controllers are optimized numerically to achieve robust closed-loop performance despite modeling uncertainty. The structure is chosen among classical teleoperation structures. An efficient algorithm is selected and implemented to design such a controller, which is evaluated for a palpation task. It is compared to a full-order unstructured controller, representative of the design approach that has been used in the teleoperation literature up to now. The comparison highlights the advantages of our new approach: order-reduction steps and counter-intuitive behaviors are avoided. A structured fixed-order controller combined with a disturbance observer is implemented during a needle insertion experiment and allowed to obtain excellent performance.

The present thesis focuses on characterisation of microstructure and the resulting mechanical and tribological properties of CVD and PVD coatings used in metal cutting applications. These thin and hard coatings are designed to improve the tribological performance of cutting tools which in metal cutting operations may result in improved cutting performance, lower energy consumption, lower production costs and lower impact on the environment.  In order to increase the understanding of the tribological behaviour of the coating systems a number of friction and wear tests have been performed and evaluated by post-test microscopy and surface analysis. Much of the work has focused on coating cohesive and adhesive strength, surface fatigue resistance, abrasive wear resistance and friction and wear behaviour under sliding contact and metal cutting conditions. The results show that the CVD deposition of accurate crystallographic phases, e.g. α-Al2O3 rather than κ-Al2O3, textures and multilayer structures can increase the wear resistance of Al2O3. However, the characteristics of the interfaces, e.g. topography as well as interfacial porosity, have a strong impact on coating adhesion and consequently on the resulting properties.  Through the deposition of well designed bonding and template layer structures the above problems may be eliminated. Also, the presence of macro-particles in PVD coatings may have a significant impact on the interfacial adhesive strength, increasing the tendency to coating spalling and lowering the surface fatigue resistance, as well as increasing the friction in sliding contacts. Finally, the CVD-Al2O3 coating topography influences the contact conditions in sliding as well as in metal cutting. In summary, the work illuminates the importance of understanding the relationships between deposition process parameters, composition and microstructure, resulting properties and tribological performance of CVD and PVD coatings and how this knowledge can be used to develop the coating materials of tomorrow.

The general trend in the car body manufacturing industry is towards low-series production and reduction of press lubricants and car weight. The limited use of press lubricants, in combination with the introduction of high and ultra-high strength sheet materials, continuously increases the demands of the forming tools. To provide the means of forming new generations of sheet material, development of new tool materials with improved galling resistance is required, which may include tailored microstructures, introducing of specific(MC, M(C,N))carbides and nitrides, coatings and improved surface finish. In the present work, the wear mechanisms in real forming operations have been studied and emulated on a laboratory scale by developing a test equipment. The wear mechanisms identified in the real forming process, were distinguished into a sequence of events consisting of initial local adhesive wear of the sheets resulting in transfer of sheet material to the tool surfaces. Successive forming operations led to growth of the transfer layer and initiation of scratching of the sheets. Finally, scratching changed into severe adhesive wear, associated with gross macroscopic damage. The wear process was repeated in the laboratory test-equipment in sliding between several tool materials, ranging from cast iron to conventional ingot cast tool steels to advanced powder metallurgy tool steel, against dual-phase carbon steel sheets. By use of the test-equipment, selected tool materials were ranked regarding wear resistance in sliding against ferritic-martensitic steel sheets at different contact pressures. Wear in sheet metal forming is mainly determined by adhesion; initially between the tool and sheet surface interaction and subsequently, after initiation of material transfer, between a sheet to sheet contact. Atomic force microscopy force curves showed that adhesion is sensitive to both chemical composition and temperature. By alloying of iron with 18wt.% Cr and 8wt.% Ni, alloying in itself, or changes in crystal structure, led to an increase of 3 times in adhesion at room temperature. Hence, alloying may be assumed a promising way for control of adhesive properties. Additionally, frictional heating should be controlled to avoid high adhesion as, generally, adhesion was found to increase with increasing temperature for all investigated materials.

No description available.

No description available.

Friction is a phenomenon which is present in most mechanical devices and frequently encountered in everyday life. In particular, understanding of this phenomenon is important in the modelling of contact between an elastic object and an obstacle. Noncoercive incremental contact problems with Coulomb friction constitute an important class of such friction problems due to their frequent occurrence in mechanical engineering. They occur for example when modelling an object which is not fixed to a support. The topic of this thesis is to study this class of friction problems. This thesis considers both discrete and continuous systems. For the continuous systems we consider both problems with a nonlocal friction law where the contact force is mollified and problems with a normal compliance friction law where the body may penetrate the obstacle. For all friction problems we derive a sufficient condition for the existence of a solution. This condition is a compatibility condition on the applied force field, and if it is violated there exists a nontrivial solution to a corresponding dynamical problem.

In this thesis a new design concept of tribologically active coatings aimed for low friction applications, have been explored. Materials modeled by ab initio DFT calculations were realized through deposition of carbide and nanocomposite coatings by DC-magnetron sputtering. The design concept employs destabilization of a carbide material by alloying with a weak carbide-forming element, which refines the structure into a nanocomposite. The destabilization creates a driving force for superficial ejection of carbon in a tribological contact, forming a lubricious graphitic carbon layer. The otherwise hard material limits the real contact area and the transformed layer accounts for low shear resistance. Hence, the ideal situation for low friction is provided by formation of an easily sheared thin surface layer on a hard material. TiAlC was chosen as a model system for the theoretical modeling as well as for the depositions. The elemental composition, microstructure and mechanical properties of the coatings were characterized to relate the inherent properties to the experimentally achieved tribological response. As predicted by theory, TiAlC coatings were shown to provide self-lubrication on the atomic scale by giving low friction through a tribologically induced surface restructuring. It was shown possible to reduce the friction coefficient from 0.35 for TiC to 0.05 by addition of Al. Alloying with Al also proved to be a potent method in tailoring residual stresses from high and often detrimental levels to acceptable levels, with no significant reduction in either hardness or Young’s modulus. The effect of adding Al into TiC on the oxidation resistance was also explored. The critical temperature for onset of oxidation proved to increase with the Al-content from about 350°C for TiC to about 450°C for TiAlC with about 7 at% Al. A further increase in Al content did not change the onset temperature further but reduced the oxidation rate.

This thesis addresses normal axisymmetric contact of dissimilar elastic solids at finite interfacial friction. It is shown that in the case of smooth and convex but otherwise arbitrary contact profiles and monotonically increasing loading a single stick-slip contour evolves being independent of loading and profile geometry. This allows developing an incremental procedure based on a reduced problem corresponding to frictional rigid flat punch indentation of an elastic half-space. The reduced problem, being independent of loading and contact region, was solved by a finite element method based on a stationary contact contour and characterized by high accuracy. Subsequently, a tailored cumulative superposition procedure was developed to resolve the original problem to determine global and local field values for two practically important geometries: flat and conical profiles with rounded edges and apices. Results are given for relations between force, depth and contact contours together with surface stress distributions and maximum von Mises effective stress, in particular to predict initiation of fracture and plastic flow. It is also observed that the presence of friction radically reduces the magnitude of the maximum surface tensile stress, thus retarding brittle fracture initiation. Hertzian fracture through indentation of flat float glass specimens by steel balls has been examined experimentally for a full load cycle. It has been observed that if the specimen survived during loading to a maximum level it frequently failed at decreasing load. It has been proposed by Johnson et al. (1973) that the underlying physical cause of Hertzian fracture initiation during load removal is that at unloading frictional tractions reverse their sign over part of the contact region. Guided by these considerations a robust computational procedure has been developed to determine global and local field values in particular at unloading at finite friction. In contrast to the situation at monotonically increasing loading, at unloading invariance properties are lost and stick-slip regions proved to be severely history dependent and in particular with an opposed frictional shear stress at the contact boundary region. This causes an increase of the maximum tensile stress at the contour under progressive unloading. It is shown that the experimental observations concerning Hertzian fracture initiation at unloading are at least in qualitative correlation with the effect friction has on the maximum surface tensile stress. A contact cycle between two dissimilar elastic bodies at finite Coulomb friction has been further investigated analytically and numerically for a wider range of material parameters and contact geometries. With the issue of Hertzian fracture initiation in mind, results concerning the influence of the friction coefficient and compliance parameters on the absolute maximum surface tensile stress during a frictional contact cycle are reported along with the magnitudes of the relative increase of maximum tensile stresses at unloading. Based on a critical stress fracture criterion it is discussed how the predicted increases will influence the critical loads required for crack initiation. Fracture loads are measured with steel and tungsten carbide spherical indenters in contact with float glass specimens at monotonically increasing loading and during a load cycle. Computational predictions concerning the fracture loads are given based on Hertz and frictional contact theories combined with a critical stress fracture criterion. The computational results obtained for frictional contact are shown to be in better agreement with experimental findings as compared to the predictions based on the Hertz theory. The remaining quantitative discrepancy was attributed to the well-known fact that a Hertzian macro-crack initiates from pre-existing defects on the specimen’s surface. In order to account for the influence of the random distribution of these defects on the fracture loads at monotonic loading, Weibull statistics was introduced. The predicted critical loads corresponding to 50% failure probability were found to be in close agreement with experimentally observed ones. / QC 20100729

This thesis discusses the effects of basal friction and basement configuration on the deformation of the fold-and-thrust belts in convergent zones. A series of analogue models were conducted with adjacent different basal configuration and frictional properties to observe and gain a better understanding of these basal effects and their interactions. The results from these side-by-side systematic models demonstrate that the kinematics and geometry of the deformation wedges are strongly influenced by the mechanical and geometrical basal effects. In these experiments, high accuracy laser scanner and digital camera were used to record the evolution of the surface topography of the deformed sand packs. Comparison between models with different basal friction shows that the basal friction plays a significant role on the propagation and topography of the deformation structures in aspects such as wedge height, taper angle, number of imbricates and deformation front. The models with a basal viscous material, which acts as low friction substrate, illustrates that the propagation of deformation above viscous material is faster and further than above the adjacent mechanically different frictional decollement. In the experiments with a moving plate under the part of the sand pack, the velocity discontinuity was introduced by either rigid, i.e. frontal edge of the metal plate, or deformable like distal end of the viscous materials. The results of these kinds of experiments, applicable to for example basement faults, salt decollements and tectonic underplating simulations, illustrate that the deformation localizes and develops continuously above the velocity discontinuities. Besides, the different rate and distance of the propagation of deformation fronts caused by different substrate distribution between the adjacent zones also lead to the formation of transpressive zones at the boundary of these adjacent domains with different basal friction/configurations.

This dissertation presents the results of an investigation into the corrosion resistance of friction stir welding (FSW) for aerospace structures. Two of the most common aerospace aluminum alloys, 2024 and 7075, were investigated. In the as-welded condition, both alloys were found to be highly susceptible to exfoliation corrosion, and 7075 was found to be susceptible to stress corrosion cracking as well. The goal of this research was to identify proper initial temper selection and postweld aging treatments for enhancing the corrosion resistance of both 2024 and 7075 alloys, and their dissimilar joints. A large number of heat treatments were investigated for 7075 in the T6 and T73 tempers, including retrogression re-aging (RRA). Heat treatments were also investigated for 2024-T3 and 2024-T81. Samples were evaluated for resistance to exfoliation corrosion using optical microscopy. Microhardness, electrical conductivity, tension, and fatigue crack propagation tests were also performed on the samples. Beneficial heat treatments were found for both alloys as well as for their dissimilar joints. / "December 2005." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering