published_or_final_version / Zoology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Vibration in internal turning is a problem in the manufacturing industry. Vibrations appear under the excitation applied by the material deformation process during the machining of a workpiece. In order for a lathe to perform an internal turning or boring operation, for example, in a pre-drilled hole in a workpiece, it is generally required that the boring bar should be long and slender; therefore extra sensitive to vibrations. These vibrations will affect the result of machining, in particular the surface finish, also the tool life may be reduced. As a result of tool vibration, severe acoustic noise frequently occurs in the working environment. This thesis comprises three parts and the first part presents a method for active control of boring bar vibration. This method consists of an active boring bar controlled by, for example, an analog controller. The focus lies on the analog controller and the advantages that may be obtained from working in the analog domain. The controller is a lead-lag compensator with digitally controlled parameters, such as gain and phase. However, signals remain in the analog domain. In addition, the analog controller is compared with a digital adaptive controller and it is found that both controllers yield an attenuation of the vibration by up to 50 dB. The second part of this thesis concerns the dynamic properties of a clamped boring bar used by the industry. In order to design a robust controller for a certain system, knowledge about the system's dynamic properties is required. On the workshop floor, a boring bar is dismounted and remounted, and reconfiguration of boring bars will alter the dynamic properties of the clamped boring bar. The dynamic properties of a standard boring bar and an active boring bar for a number of possible clamping conditions, as well as for a linearized clamping have been investigated based on an experimental approach. Also simple Euler-Bernoulli modeling of clamped boring bars incorporating simple non-rigid models of the boring bar clamping are investigated. Initial simulations of nonlinear SDOF systems have been carried out: one with a signed squared stiffness and one with a cubic stiffness. The purpose of these simulations was to identify a nonlinearity that introduces a similar behavior in the SDOF system dynamics as the nonlinear behavior observed in the dynamic properties of a clamped boring bar. The third and final part of this thesis focuses on vibration analysis methods in engineering education. A signal analyzer (which is a commonly used instrument in signal processing and vibration analysis) was made accessible via the Internet. Assignments were developed for students to learn and practice vibration analysis on real signals from a real setup of a relevant structure; a clamped boring bar. Whilst the experimental setup was fixed, the instrument and sensor configuration nonetheless enable a variety of experiment, for example: excitation signal analysis, spectrum analysis and experimental modal analysis.

Recent efforts in engineering education research have set in motion reform advocating more active learning in the classroom. Active learning centers on the student and consists of pedagogical approaches to address the broad spectrum of educational backgrounds and demographics. In order to further the research focused on active learning products, appropriate and innovative assessment methods must be developed. For this thesis, innovative active learning modules are the focus of the analysis. In total, 12 Finite Element tutorials are designed and assessed using both statistical analysis and confidence interval correlations. Fundamental and informative assessment strategies have been developed to iteratively improve active learning approaches. Results of this process show that the finite element tutorials lead to enhanced student learning that can span across student demographics. Certain cases do exist where unique learning styles or personality types respond more positively to this pedagogical technique than others. Global outcomes are presented to assess these tutorials cumulatively, as active learning products. Finally, the assessment methodology is redesigned into a useful toolkit for educators to follow in furthering efforts of integrating active learning into any engineering classroom. / text

Collecting and annotating videos of realistic human actions is tedious, yet critical for training action recognition systems. We propose a method to actively request the most useful video annotations among a large set of unlabeled videos. Predicting the utility of annotating unlabeled video is not trivial, since any given clip may contain multiple actions of interest, and it need not be trimmed to temporal regions of interest. To deal with this problem, we propose a detection-based active learner to train action category models. We develop a voting-based framework to localize likely intervals of interest in an unlabeled clip, and use them to estimate the total reduction in uncertainty that annotating that clip would yield. On three datasets, we show our approach can learn accurate action detectors more efficiently than alternative active learning strategies that fail to accommodate the "untrimmed" nature of real video data. / text

The aim of the thesis is to propose active damping as a potential control strategy for chatter instability in machine tools. The regenerative process theory explains chatter as a closed loop interaction between the structural dynamics and the cutting process. This is considered to be the most dominant reason behind machine tool chatter although other instability causing mechanisms exist. The stability lobe diagram provides a quantitative idea of the limits of stable machining in terms of two physical parameters: the width of contact between tool and the workpiece, called the width of cut and the speed of rotation of the spindle. It is found that the minimum value of the stability limit is proportional to the structural damping ratio for turning operations. This important finding provides the motivation of influencing the structural dynamics by active damping to enhance stability limits of a machining operation. A direct implementation of active damping in an industrial environment may be difficult. So an intermediate step of testing the strategy in a laboratory setup, without conducting real cutting is proposed. Two mechatronic "Hardware in the Loop" simulators for chatter in turning and milling are presented, which simulate regenerative chatter experimentally without conducting real cutting tests. A simple cantilever beam, representing the MDOF dynamics of the machine tool structure constitutes the basic hardware part and the cutting process is simulated in real time on a DSP board. The values of the cutting parameters such as spindle speed and the axial width of cut can be changed on the DSP board and the closed loop interaction between the structure and the cutting process can be led to instability. The demonstrators are then used as test beds to investigate the efficiency of active damping, as a potential chatter stabilization strategy. Active damping is easy to implement, robust and does not require a very detailed model of the structure for proper functioning, provided a collocated sensor and actuator configuration is followed. The idea of active damping is currently being implemented in the industry in various metal cutting machines as part of the European Union funded SMARTOOL project (www.smartool.org), intended to propose smart chatter control technologies in machining operations.

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It has become increasingly clear that a complete picture of galaxy evolution requires a better understanding of the role of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). In particular, they could be responsible for regulating star formation and galaxy growth via feedback processes. There are also competing views about the main modes of stellar growth and supermassive black hole growth in galaxies that need to be resolved. With high infrared luminosities (thus star formation rates) and a frequent occurrence of AGN, galaxies selected in the far-infrared wavebands form an ideal sample to search for a connection between AGN and star formation. The first part of this thesis contains a detailed analysis of the molecular gas properties of nearby infrared luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs and ULIRGs). We find that the enhanced molecular gas density in the most IR-luminous systems can be explained by major galaxy mergers, and that AGN are more likely to reside in higher-density systems. While the frequent concurrence of AGN and galaxy mergers in ULIRGs was already established, this work provides a coherent framework that explains trends observed with five molecular gas tracers with a broad range of critical densities, and a comparison with simulations that reproduce observed molecular line ratios without invoking AGN-induced chemistry. The second part of the thesis presents an analysis of the AGN content of intermediate redshift galaxies (0.3<z<1). However, identifying complete AGN samples at these redshift is challenging because it is difficult to find X-ray weak or absorbed AGN. To alleviate this problem, we developed the Mass-Excitation (MEx) diagram, which is applicable out to redshift of 1 with existing optical spectra. It improves the overall AGN census by detecting AGN that are missed in even the most sensitive X-ray surveys. The new diagnostic was used to study the concurrence of star formation and AGN in 70 micron-selected galaxies from the Far-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy survey. When multiple AGN diagnostics are combined, we find not only a high AGN fraction in FIR-selected galaxies (as high as for nearby FIR-selected galaxies), but a high incidence of X-ray absorbed AGN. These findings may have considerable implications for current views about the main mode of AGN growth.

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