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

该学院早期职业发展(Career)计划奖项的目的是研究将“快速变化的动力”引入进给驱动器及其协同开发，以此作为在精密制造机床中同时实现高速、高精度和降低能耗/成本的一种手段。目前，制造机械的进给驱动(即运动输送系统)都是以固定的机电结构进行保守设计的，导致在速度、精度和能效之间产生不希望看到的折衷。这项研究设想了类似于混合动力汽车动力总成的馈电驱动装置；它设想它们被设计为智能地实时改变其机电结构，以实现高性能和高能效，作为正在执行的制造操作的函数。这些所谓的动态自适应进给驱动器的关键挑战是，它们需要一种设计方法来在快速切换下产生最佳的组合动态(即最大化协同效应)。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鸿沟，从而使动态适应系统的好处能够得到充分利用。教育目标是通过课程开发和推广努力，促进工程教育中的协同思维，帮助形成更多样化和更有能力的劳动力。这项研究的更广泛影响是，在不过度牺牲其质量和生产率的情况下，显著提高各种制造机器的能效-类似于混合动力电动汽车在汽车行业的变革性影响。与美国的工业合作伙伴的合作将使这项研究的结果能够转移到工业上。该教育计划将开发教学资源，以解决本科教育分割的问题，并进行非传统的外联努力，通过在学科的社会文化背景下展示科学/工程职业，激励未被充分代表的中学生追求科学/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.