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Adjustable leaf spring increases maximum operating pressure of pump from 2 to over 60 psi (13 to over 400 kN/m2). Small commercial bellows pump using ac-powered electromagnet to vibrate bellows at mechanical resonance modified to operate over wider pressure range.
A bandpass amplifier employing a field effect transistor amplifier first stage is described with a resistive load either a.c. or directly coupled to the non-inverting input of an operational amplifier second stage which is loaded in a Wien Bridge configuration. The bandpass amplifier may be operated with a signal injected into the gate terminal of the field effect transistor and the signal output taken from the output terminal of the operational amplifier. The operational amplifier stage appears as an inductive reactance, capacitive reactance and negative resistance at the non-inverting input of the operational amplifier, all of which appear in parallel with the resistive load of the field effect transistor.
Two collocated, weakly coupled probes, one loop and one dipole, detect the magnetic and electric fields inside a maser cavity. Signals from the probes are compared in phase, and the signal output from the phase detector is applied to a varactor, the reactance of which is coupled into the cavity by a microwave coupler. Alternatively, the varactor may be placed inside the cavity. Any deviation of phase from 90 deg as detected by the phase detector will then produce an error signal that will change the reactance coupled into the resonant cavity to change its reactance, and thus correct its resonance frequency. An alternative to using two probes is to use a single disk probe oriented to detect both the magnetic and electric fields, and thus provide the error signal directly.
A structure for reducing vibratory airloading in a rotor blade with a leading edge and a trailing edge includes a cut out portion at the trailing edge. A substantially wedge shaped cross section, inertially deflectable tab, also with a leading edge and a trailing edge is pivotally mounted in the cut out portion. The trailing edge of the tab may move above and below the rotor blade. A torsion strap applies force against the tab when the trailing edge of the tab is above and below the rotor blade. A restraining member is slidably movable along the torsion strap to vary torsional biasing force supplied by the torsion bar to the tab. A plurality of movable weights positioned between plates vary a center of gravity of the tab. Skin of the tab is formed from unidirectional graphite and fiberglass layers. Sliders coupled with a pinned degree of freedom at rod eliminate bending of tab under edgewise blade deflection.
A real time adaptive controller was designed and tested successfully on a fourth order laboratory dynamic system which features very low structural damping and a noncolocated actuator sensor pair. The controller, implemented in a digital minicomputer, consists of a state estimator, a set of state feedback gains, and a frequency locked loop (FLL) for real time parameter identification. The FLL can detect the closed loop natural frequency of the system being controlled, calculate the mismatch between a plant parameter and its counterpart in the state estimator, and correct the estimator parameter in real time. The adaptation algorithm can correct the controller error and stabilize the system for more than 50% variation in the plant natural frequency, compared with a 10% stability margin in frequency variation for a fixed gain controller having the same performance at the nominal plant condition. After it has locked to the correct plant frequency, the adaptive controller works as well as the fixed gain controller does when there is no parameter mismatch. The very rapid convergence of this adaptive system is demonstrated experimentally, and can also be proven with simple root locus methods.
A fourth-order laboratory dynamic system featuring very low structural damping and a noncolocated actuator-sensor pair has been used to test a novel real-time adaptive controller, implemented in a minicomputer, which consists of a state estimator, a set of state feedback gains, and a frequency-locked loop for real-time parameter identification. The adaptation algorithm employed can correct controller error and stabilize the system for more than 50 percent variation in the plant's natural frequency, compared with a 10 percent stability margin in frequency variation for a fixed gain controller having the same performance as the nominal plant condition. The very rapid convergence achievable by this adaptive system is demonstrated experimentally, and proven with simple, root-locus methods.
Compact unit operates much faster than conventional piezoelectric scanners. High voltage creates electric field in Pockels cell, changing refractive properties. Cell changes optical path length between mirrors without mechanically moving anything in gap. High voltage varied rapidly to scan interferometer. Voltage applied longitudinally or transversely, depending on type of Pockels cell. New electro-optic scanner scans given range in one-millionth time of piezoelectric scanner - tens to hundreds of nanoseconds per interferometer order. Also reducing size of interferometer.
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Numerical optimization techniques are used to modify the dynamic response at a specified point(s) of a helicopter airframe structure due to a steady state narrow band excitation. Calculation of steady state vibration amplitude is reduced to the solution of linear equations with complex coefficients. The sensitivity of the dynamic amplitudes with respect to the structural parameter perturbations can be computed with the same technique as the one used in the static displacement sensitivity without requiring eigenvector sensitivity. Approximate models for critical structural responses are created based on the sensitivity data to reduce the amount of computational effort and to enable the design of structures of practical scale and complexity. This approach is general in that it accommodates static, dynamic, and frequency constraints simultaneously as long as their computational models are available. It can be used in optimizing mass distribution as well as stiffness modifications of practical structures.
The apparatus comprises means for producing an atomic beam containing the isotope of interest and other isotopes. Means are provided for producing a magnetic field traversing the path of the atomic beam of an intensity sufficient to broaden the energy domain of the various individual magnetic sublevels of the isotope of interest and having the atomic beam passing therethrough. A laser beam is produced of a frequency and polarization selected to maximize the activation of only individual magnetic sublevels of the isotope of interest with the portion of its broadened energy domain most removed from other isotopes with the stream. The laser beam is directed so as to strike the atomic beam within the magnetic field and traverse the path of the atomic beam whereby only the isotope of interest is activated by the laser beam. The apparatus further includes means for producing a collimated and high intensity beam of electrons of narrow energy distribution within the magnetic field which is aimed so as to strike the atomic beam while the atomic beam is simultaneously struck by the laser beam and at an energy level selected to ionize the activated isotope of interest but not ground state species included therewith. Deflection means are disposed in the usual manner to collect the ions.
Spacing of visible interference pattern determines frequency of infrared radiation. Variable photoconductivity grating formed by interference of two visible laser beams intersecting on surface of proposed AlGaAs device substituted for fixed metal grating. Proposed device provides higher output-power density and greater tunability.
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The development and design of an instrument for making water vapor Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) measurements from a down-looking airborne platform are described. The wavemeter device for this NASA-LASE (Lidar Atmospheric Sensing Experiment) project involves a classical Fabry-Perot interferometer approach. The interoferometer design, breadboard design, data retrieval algorithms, and errors are examined, and the design of the airborne instrument is discussed, including the illumination and imaging considerations, optomechanical component arrangement, electronic configuration, and proposed calibration technique.
Incorporation of acousto-optical tunable filter (AOTF) in cavity of solid-state laser, provides means of adjusting wavelength of laser output electronically, according to recent proposal. Output wavelength randomly selected in microseconds. Technique useful in remote-sensing applications, such as in differential-absorption lidar (DIAL) and in communications for wavelength-division multiplexing.
A finite element Galerkin formulation was employed to study the optimum attenuation and reflection characteristics of acoustic waves propagating in tw0 dimensional straight ducts with extended reacting absorbing walls without a mean flow. The reflection and transmission of acoustic energy at the entrance and the exit of the duct were determined by coupling the finite element solutions in the absorbing portion of the duct to the eigenfunctions of an infinite, uniform, hard wall duct. In the frequency range where the duct height and acoustic wave length are nearly equal, power attenuation contours were examined to determine conditions for minimizing acoustic transmission through the duct. The extended reacting liners were found to significantly minimize the reflective characteristics of the duct rather than to increase absorption in the liner. Thus, extended reacting wall liner properties can be theoretically chosen to yield large impedance mismatches in an open straight duct.
An overview of some of the developments completed on an alexandrite laser for making water vapor DIAL measurements is presented in this paper. A computer control for active stabilization of the two intracavity etalons has been implemented and recently tested in an aircraft environment. Long-term frequency drift (i.e., 2 hours) of less than 0.7 pm has been observed in the laboratory. An alignment technique to get the optimum free spectral range ratio for the two etalons is also developed.
System identification is studied for the explicit purpose of supporting modern H-infinity robust control design objectives. In the analysis, the true plant is not assumed to be in the identification model set. An integrated identification/robust control problem is posed in which the optimal solution guarantees the best robust performance relative to the system information contained in a given experimental data set. A numerical example demonstrating an approximate solution to the problem indicates the usefulness of the approach.
The computed torque control problem is examined for a robot arm with flexible, geared, joint drive systems which are typical in many industrial robots. The standard computed torque algorithm is not directly applicable to this class of manipulators because of the dynamics introduced by the joint drive system. The proposed approach to computed torque control combines a computed torque algorithm with torque controller at each joint. Three such control schemes are proposed. The first scheme uses the joint torque control system currently implemented on the robot arm and a novel form of the computed torque algorithm. The other two use the standard computed torque algorithm and a novel model following torque control system based on model following techniques. Standard tasks and performance indices are used to evaluate the performance of the controllers. Both numerical simulations and experiments are used in evaluation. The study shows that all three proposed systems lead to improved tracking performance over a conventional PD controller.