Smart Materials Actuator and Sensor Systems: A Practical Approach to Design and Modelling

This book provides a comprehensive and structured guide to designing and modelling smart material actuator and sensor systems. It covers established and technologically promising material systems, specifically thermal shape memory alloys, magnetic shape memory alloys, ferroelectric materials (piezoceramics), and dielectric electroactive polymers. The main objective is to introduce a common approach to designing mechatronics systems based on four steps:



Understand the different materials working principles.
Understand experimental results and working with material-specific engineering diagrams for a first, equilibrium based actuator design to predict force and stroke.
Development of a unified physics-based mathematical model for quantitative design (MATLAB code), including include transient behaviour under arbitrary, time-dependent input.
Simulation of typical actuator/sensor systems (MATLAB/Simulink), including basic, closed-loop control behaviour (PID).

Steps 2-4 the text is complemented by numerous problems and example code is provided on the companion website. The text also presents numerous typical applications for each material system, familiarizing the reader with each material?s strengths and weaknesses. Finally, each material?s chapter concludes with a discussion of the relevant electronics concepts.