Underactuated Compliant Resonant Walking Robot with Steering Mechanism

<br/>This thesis report presents research on small walking robots. The report begins with an introduction that explains the project’s origin, outlines the project’s goal, and provides an overview of the report’s contents. Following the introduction, a literature study is conducted to investigate the current state-of- the-art steering mechanisms...

Forces and vibrations in a Modular HVDC Generator

Offshore wind energy is expected to play a major role in the upcoming energy transition. For long distances to shore, it is preferable to connect the wind farms to land by means of High-Voltage DC (HVDC) cables to reduce losses and costs. This currently poses challenges, as wind turbine generators produce variable-frequency low-voltage AC power,...

Microvibration test bench for tiny reaction wheels

Reaction wheels are often the main contributor to microvibrations on satellites. These vibrations are a source of pointing errors and therefore need to be limited as much as possible. The miniaturization trend in the space industry and universities fostered the production of very small reaction wheels, suited to Cubesat and PocketQube scales. A...

Impact of the Stiffness Characteristics of Wrapped Composite Joints on Eigenfrequencies of Wind Turbine Jacket Support Structures

This report investigates the influence of joint stiffness on the eigenfrequencies of offshore wind turbine supporting jacket structures. The joint is investigated individually, within the context of a jacket structure, and within the context of the entire offshore wind turbine structure. These analyses were specifically conducted for the case of...

Realization and assessment of metal additive manufacturing and topology optimization for high-precision motion systems

The design of high-precision motion stages, which must exhibit high dynamic performance, is a challenging task. Manual design is difficult, time-consuming, and leads to sub-optimal designs that fail to fully exploit the extended geometric freedom that additive manufacturing offers. By using topology optimization and incorporating all...

Vibrations In An Active Controlled Hexapod

The Ampelmann system occasionally starts vibrating unexpectedly, especially while the system is placed on a pedestal. These vibrations are believed to be caused by the eigenfrequencies of the system and/or amplification caused by the motion control algorithm. In this research an investigation in this phenomenon was done. This investigation was...

High-precision motion system design by topology optimization considering additive manufacturing

In the design process of high-precision motion stages, the dynamic behavior is of paramount importance. Manual design of such a stage is a time-consuming process, involving many iterations between engineers responsible for mechanics, dynamics and control. By using topology optimization in combination with additive manufacturing, post...

Practical Engineering Design Tool for Vibration Sensitive Laboratory Building Structures: Development of a practical design tool based on a scientific model for an early design of vibration sensitive laboratory building structures excited by traffic induced vibrations for use in engineering practice

The prediction of structural vibrations in vibration sensitive laboratory structures is a complex problem involving computationally heavy 3D models with long computational times. However, in the early design phases of a project long computational times are undesirable. Therefore the problem statement of this Master thesis concerns the...

The design of a monolithic, compliant, resonant running robot at insect scale

Running robots at insect scale are an upcoming research field, because of their numerous potential applications like exploration of hazardous environments such as collapsed buildings, natural disaster sites and debris. To date no report exists on such a robot that either exploits its resonance, or that is monolithic. These properties, however,...

A static and free vibration analysis method for non-prismatic composite beams with a non-uniform flexible shear connection

Steel-concrete composite beams are widely used in practice because of their economic cross-section design. As sustainability becomes more and more important in the construction industry, the design of composite beams must be adapted to meet the requirements of the circular economy. This calls for demountability and reusability of the structural...

Topology optimization involving constrained eigenfrequencies

High performance machines such as those used in the semiconductor industry, robotics or racing engines have lots of fast moving parts. The dynamic properties of these moving parts are crucial to the performance of the machine. Therefore these moving parts have to be carefully designed which is often a very time consuming iterative process. In...

Topology optimization of constrained eigenfrequencies

High performance machines such as those used in the semiconductor industry, robotics or racing engines have lots of fast moving parts. The dynamic properties of these moving parts are crucial to the performance of the machine. Therefore these moving parts have to be carefully designed which is often a very time consuming iterative process. In...

Using Topology Optimization for Actuator Placement within Motion Systems

Topology optimization is a strong approach for generating optimal designs which cannot be obtained using conventional optimization methods. Improving structural characteristics by changing the internal topology of a design domain has been fascinating scientists and engineers for years. Topology optimization can be described as a distribution of...