Control Technology for Smart Materials

The objectives of this program are aimed at the development of controls technology for Smart Structures and Materials systems with large numbers of sensors and actuators. This development focuses on a methodology for designing controllers that control large-scale Smart Structures and Materials systems with potentially thousands of inputs and outputs at a dramatically reduced cost in both computation and inputoutput interconnection complexity. Moreover, the methodology can be used to implement large-scale controllers that have highly scalable, multiprocessor architectures. Our program objectives can be summarized as follows 1 Demonstrate an initial proof-of-concept of the wavelet-based method for controlling smart structures and materials with large transducer arrays. 2 Develop a practical and mathematically sound methodology for designing and implementing computationally efficient, sparsely interconnected, scalable control systems. 3 Validate the new methodology by designing and simulating a control system for control of simple structures using both numerical modeling data and experimentally measured data.