CAREER: Dynamically Adaptive Feed Drive Systems for Smart and Sustainable Manufacturing

该学院早期职业发展（Career）计划的目标是研究将“快速变化动力学”引入进给驱动，并将其协同利用，作为在精密制造机器中同时实现高速、高精度和降低能耗/成本的手段。制造机器的进给驱动器（即运动传递系统）目前设计保守，采用固定的机电结构，导致速度，精度和能源效率之间的不良妥协。该研究设想将馈源驱动设计成混合动力汽车的动力系统；它设想它们被设计成实时智能地改变其机电结构，以实现高性能和能源效率，作为正在执行的制造操作的功能。这些所谓的动态自适应馈电驱动的关键挑战是，它们需要一种在快速切换下产生最佳组合动力学（即最大化协同作用）的设计方法。在文献中没有这样的方法。这项研究的智力价值在于解决了这一知识差距，从而使动态适应系统的好处得到充分利用。教育目标是通过课程开发和推广工作，促进工程教育的协同思维，以促进更多样化和更有能力的劳动力。这项研究的更广泛的影响是在不过度牺牲其质量和生产力的情况下，能够显著提高各种制造机器的能源效率——类似于混合动力汽车在汽车行业的变革性影响。与美国工业伙伴的合作将使这项研究的成果能够转移到工业上。该教育计划将开发教学资源，以解决划分本科教育的问题，并通过在学科的社会文化背景下展示科学/工程职业，开展非常规的推广工作，激励代表性不足的中学生追求科学/工程职业。

The objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award is to investigate the introduction of "fast-varying dynamics" into feed drives and its synergistic exploitation as a means to simultaneously achieve high speed, high accuracy and reduced energy consumption/costs in precision manufacturing machines. Feed drives (i.e., motion delivery systems) of manufacturing machines are currently designed conservatively with fixed electromechanical structures, resulting in undesirable compromises among speed, accuracy and energy efficiency. The research imagines feed drives designed like the powertrains of hybrid electric vehicles; it imagines that they are designed to intelligently vary their electromechanical structure in real time to achieve high performance and energy efficiency as a function of the manufacturing operation being performed. The key challenge with these so-called dynamically adaptive feed drives is that they require a design approach for generating the best combined dynamics (i.e., maximizing synergy) under fast switching. No such approach is available in the literature. The intellectual merit of this research is in addressing this knowledge gap thus enabling the benefits of dynamically adaptive systems to be fully exploited. The educational objective is to foster synergistic thinking in engineering education through curriculum development and outreach efforts that contribute to a more diverse and capable workforce.The broader impact of this research is in enabling significant improvements in the energy efficiency of a wide range of manufacturing machines without unduly sacrificing their quality and productivity - similar to the transformative impact of hybrid electric vehicles in the automotive sector. Collaborations with a US-based industrial partner will enable the results of this research to be transferred to industry. The educational plan will develop teaching resources to address the problem of compartmentalized undergraduate education, and pursue an unconventional outreach effort that inspires underrepresented middle school students towards pursuing science/engineering careers by presenting science/engineering careers in the socio-cultural context of the subjects.