With the ability to generate fine displacements with a resolution down to sub-nanometers, piezoelectric actuators (PEAs) have found wide applications in various nano-positioning systems. However, existence of various effects in PEAs, such as hysteresis and creep, as well as dynamics can seriously degrade the PEA performance or even lead to instability. This raises a great need to model and control PEAs for improved performance, which have drawn remarkable attention in the literature. Sliding mode control (SMC) shows its potential to the control of PEA, by which the hysteresis and other nonlinear effects can be regard as disturbance to the dynamic model and thus rejected or compensated by its switching control. To implement SMC in digital computers, this research is aimed at developing novel discrete models and discrete SMC (DSMC)-based control schemes for PEAs, along with their experimental validation. The first part of this thesis concerns with the modeling and control of one-degree of freedom (DOF) PEA, which can be treated as a single-input-single-output (SISO) system. Specifically, a novel discrete model based on the concept of auto-regressive moving average (ARMA) was developed for the PEA hysteresis; and to compensate for the PEA hysteresis and improve its dynamics, an output tracking integrated discrete proportional-integral-derivative-based SMC (PID-SMC) was developed. On this basis, by making use of the availability of PEA hysteresis models, two control schemes, named “the discrete inversion feedforward based PID-SMC” and “the discrete disturbance observer (DOB)-based PID-SMC”, were further developed. To illustrate the effectiveness of the developed models and control schemes, experiments were designed and conducted on a commercially available one-DOF PEA, as compared with the existing ones. The second part of the thesis presents the extension of the developed modeling and control methods to multi-DOF PEAs. Given the fact that details with regard to the PEA internal configurations is not typically provided by the manufacturer, a state space model based on the black box system identification was developed for the three-DOF PEA. The developed model was then integrated in the output tracking based discrete PID-SMC, with its effectiveness verified through the experiments on a commercially available three-DOF PEA. The superiority of the proposed control method over the conventional PID controller was also experimentally investigated and demonstrated. Finally, by integrating with a DOB in the discrete PID-based SMC, a novel control scheme is resulted to compensate for the nonlinearities of the three-DOF PEA. To verify its effectiveness, the discrete DOB based PID-SMC was applied in the control experiments and compared with the existing SMC. The significance of this research lies in the development of the discrete models and PID-based SMC for PEAs, which is of great help to improve their performance. The successful application of the proposed method in the control of multi-DOF PEA allows the application of SMC to the control of complicated multi-inputs-multi-outputs (MIMO) systems without details regarding the internal configuration. Also, integration of the inversion based feedforward control and the DOB in the SMC design has been proven effective for the tracking control of PEAs.

Sheet metal forming processes are mechanical processes, designed to make products from metal sheet without material removal. These processes are applied extensively by the manufacturing industry to produce commodities such as heat exchangers or panels for automotive applications. They are suitable for production in large volumes. A typical problem in forming operations is accumulation of local sheet material adherents onto the tool surface, which may deteriorate the subsequent products. This tool failure mechanism is named galling. The aim of this work is to explain the mechanisms behind galling and establish factors how it can be reduced. The focus of this work is on the influence of tool material for minimum risk of galling. Experimental tool steels alloyed with nitrogen were designed and manufactured for systematic tribological evaluation. Reference tool materials were conventional cold forming tool steels and coated tool steels. The sheet material was austenitic stainless steel AISI 304, which is sensitive for galling. A variety of lubricants ranging from low to high viscous lubricants were used in the evaluation. The properties of the tool materials were characterized analytically and their tribological evaluation included industrial field tests and several laboratory-scale tests. The testing verified that nitrogen alloying has a very positive effect for improving galling resistance of tool steels. Tool lives comparable to the coated tool steels were achieved even with low viscous lubricants without poisonous additives. The hypothesis used for the explanation of the positive effect of nitrogen alloying is based on the critical local contact temperature at which the lubrication deteriorates. Therefore, the contact mechanism at the tool-sheet interface and the local energy formation were studied systematically. Theoretical considerations complemented with FEA analysis showed that a small size of hard particles with a high volume fraction gives low local contact loads, which leads to low frictional heating. Also, an even spacing between the hard particles and their frictional properties are of importance. Nitrogen alloyed tool steels have these properties in the form of small carbonitrides. The finding of this work can be applied to a wide range of applications that involve sliding metal contacts under severe tribological loading.

This thesis work is focused on the design of a mechanism for the passenger’s seat of a Volvo S80. This mechanism will facilitate the problems arised when somebody with limited mobility, either permanent or temporal, is entering or exiting the vehicle. The main aim is to obtain an affordable device that enhances the life of those with reduced mobility, but paying special attention to those who do not receive any kind of economical help from the government. The idea is to be able to move the seat to the outside of the car so that one can seat with no special effort. Then, the mechanism, manually, performs the movements to bring it back to the inside. The concept of being manual is to avoid electronic devices that will surely increase the cost. In this project, a possible design solution has been developed. A model was created with Autodesk Inventor 2012. The three basic positions of the mechanism were studied to determine the structural behavior of the product. For these studies, a load compensating the weight of a human was applied and the stresses and the deformation were analyzed by Finite Element Methods and the study was concluded when the safety factor was over 2.

This body of work forms a detailed and comprehensive guide for those interested in performing broadband wireless channel measurements. Discussion addresses the theoretical and practical aspects of designing and implementing a sliding correlator channel sounder, as well as how such a system may be used to measure and model the ultra-wideband wireless channel. The specific contributions of this work are as follows: Developed a systematic methodology for designing optimal sliding correlator-based channel sounders. Constructed a UWB channel sounder based upon a 17-bit LFSR that attained 1.66 ns of temporal resolution and 34 dB of dynamic range. Performed an exemplary measurement campaign of the UWB channel from which UWB angular spreads and RMS delay spreads are reported. The design procedure developed in Chapter 3 will allow researchers to build optimal channel sounders for investigating next-generation wireless channels. Chapter 4 s discussion addresses the real-world challenges of constructing a high performance sliding correlator channel sounder. Finally, the measurement campaign discussed in Chapter 5 outlines a procedure for investigating the spatio-temporal characteristics of the wireless channel and provides some of the first examples of UWB angular spread measurements.

Based on the Lyapunov stability theorem, a modified stability analysis as well as a modified observer is proposed in this thesis for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with an existent high gain observer. By assuming that the first two state variables are indirectly measurable, reanalyzing the stability of the error dynamics is presented first. The advantage of this modified analytic method is that the upper bound of the disturbance distribution functions is not required to be known in advance, and the asymptotic stability is still guaranteed. Next, based on this existent observer, a slightly modified observer is presented for systems with disturbances whose upper bound is unknown. An adaptive mechanism is embedded in the proposed observer, so that the upper bound of perturbations is not required to be known beforehand. The resultant dynamics of estimation errors can be driven into the sliding surface in a finite time, and guarantee asymptotic stability. A numerical example and a practical example are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed observer.

Online mining sequential patterns over data streams is an important problem in data mining. There are many applications of using sequential patterns in data streams, such as market analysis, network security, sensor networks and web track- ing. Previous studies have shown mining closed patterns provides more benefits than mining the complete set of frequent patterns, since closed pattern mining leads to compact results. A sequential pattern is closed if the sequential pattern does not have any supersequence which has the same support. Chang et al. proposed a time- based sliding window model. The time-based sliding window has two features, the new item is inserted in front of a sequence, and the obsolete item is removed from of tail of a sequence. For solving the problem of data mining in the time-based sliding window, Chang et al. proposed an algorithm called SeqStream. It uses a data struc- ture IST (Inverse Closed Sequence Tree) to keep the result. IST can incrementally be updated by the SeqStream algorithm. Although the SeqStream algorithm has used the technique of dividing the time-based sliding window to speed up the updating of IST, the SeqStream algorithm still scans the sliding window many times when IST needs to be updated. In this thesis, we propose an obstruction-check approach to maintain the result of closed sequential patterns. Our approach is designed based on the lattice structure. The feature of the lattice structure is that the parent is a supersequence of its children. By utilizing this feature, we decide the obstruction link between the parent and child if their support is the same. If a node does not have any obstruction link parent, the node is a closed sequential pattern. Then we can utilize this feature to locally travel the lattice structure. Moreover, we can fully utilize the features of the time-based sliding window model to locally travel the lat- tice structure. Based on the lattice structure, we propose the EULB (Exact Update based on Lattice structure with Bit stream)-Lattice algorithm. The EULB-Lattice algorithm is an exact method for mining data streams. We record additional informa- tion, instead of scanning the entire sliding window. We conduct several experiments using different synthetic data sets. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the SeqStream algorithm.

Synchronization of two identical chaotic systems with matched and mismatched perturbations by utilizing adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) technique is presented in this thesis. The sliding surface function is designed based on Lyapunov stability theorem and linear matrix inequality (LMI) optimization technique. Adaptive mechanisms embedded in the proposed control scheme are used to adapt the unknown upper bounds of the perturbations. The designed tracking controller can not only suppress the mismatched perturbations when the controlled dynamics (master-slave) are in the sliding mode, but also drive the trajectories of synchronization errors into a small bounded region whose size can be adjusted through the designed parameters. The stability of overall controlled synchronization systems is guaranteed. Application of proposed chaotic synchronization technique to secure communication as well as several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed design technique.

The purpose of this study was to integrate the principles of marine geotechnical engineering, underwater acoustic and optical observation techniques into studying the distribution of seafloor sediments and engineering stability of artificial reefs off Yong-an Harbor, Kaohsiung County, south-western coast of Taiwan. The artificial reefs were deployed to the testing site in November 9th, 1996. The goal of this study was intended to describe the engineering status of this reef site and to investigate whether these reefs were moved and buried or not; as well as, to predict whether additional reefs should be deployed to this site in the future. Long-term monitoring of underwater targets was conducted by using of side-scan sonar system, echo sounder, sub-bottom profiler, and underwater video camera. The utility of side-scan sonar system was to depict the topography and terrain features of the seabed. The other equipments were used to complement and cross correlate the results of side-scan sonar observations. In this study, wave forces against reef were estimated by Morison¡¦s equation(ex. Huang, 1995), scouring depth was calculated by Silvester¡¦s experience equation (Silvester, 1974), and the settlement of reefs by theoretical consolidation equation(ex. Das, 1990). The topography of Yung-an reef site is generally gentle and monotonous. The major texture of surficial sediments in this site was sandy silt, and some gravel was distributed at the southern part of the site. In terms of the stability on the artificial reefs project, Typhoon was the main factor which causes the reef to slide or roll. Verified by theoretical analysis and monitoring, the study area of the original stacked reefs has tumbled during the research period, while the remaining non-stacked reef shows insignificant displacement and quantity of the settlement found no cases being buried. To sum up, Yong-an artificial reef district in Kaohsiung county, respectively as A, B, C; the stacked reef under normal condition has found no significant reef being buried and moving traces and artificial reefs can fully elaborate by the gathers of the fish. According to the viewpoint of this project , "Direct contact with the reef and the body of the sea-bed " both the forces of the waves and ocean currents when a typhoon strikes is not easy for the reefs to glide. The "stacked reef" which causes the reef to slide or roll when typhoon occurs was caused by both the forces of the waves and ocean currents. "Direct contact with the reef and the body of the sea-bed " in the case of wave period of 10 sec, analysis shows that the wave height must be greater than 5.8 m in order to make the reef slide. "Stacked reef" in the case of wave period of 10 sec, analysis shows that the wave height must be greater than 4.5 m in order to make the reef roll.

Online mining association rules in data streams is an important field in the data mining. Among them, mining the maximal frequent itemsets is also an important issue. A frequent itemset is called maximal if it is not a subset of any other frequent itemset. The set of all the maximal frequent itemsets is denoted as the maximal frequent itemset. Because data streams are continuous, high speed, unbounded, and real time. As a result, we can only scan once for the data streams. Therefore, the previous algorithms to mine the maximal frequent itemsets in the traditional databases are not suitable for the data streams. Furthermore, many applications are interested in the recent data streams, and the sliding window is the model which deal with the most recent data streams. In the sliding window model, a window size is required. One of the algorithms for mining the maximal frequent itemsets based on the sliding window model is called the MFIoSSW algorithm. The MFIoSSW algorithm uses a compact structure to mine the maximal frequent itemsets. It uses an array-based structure A to store the maximal frequent itemsets and other helpful itemsets. But it takes long time to mine the maximal frequent itemsets. When the new transaction comes, the number of comparison between the new transaction and the old transactions is too much. Therefore, in this project, we propose a sliding window approach, the Subset-Lattice algorithm. We use the lattice structure to store the information of the transactions. The structure of the lattice stores the relationship between the child node and the father node. In each node, we record the itemset and the support. When the new transaction comes, we consider five relations: (1) equivalent, (2) subset, (3) intersection, (4) empty set, (5) superset. With this five relations, we can add the new transactions and update the support efficiently.

The microstructures and mechanical properties of the AZ31 Mg tubes fabricated by one-pass forward piercing tube extrusion operated at 250-400oC and 10-2-100 s-1 are examined. The grain size is refined from the initial ~75