This book is written for leading edge engineers and researchers, working with non-traditional or smart material based actuators, to help them develop such real world biomedical applications. Electrical, mechanical, mechatronics and control systems engineers will all benefit from the different techniques described in this book. The book may also serve as a reference for advanced research focused undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Specifically, this book describes a cluster of research which aims to not only advance the state of art through scientific progress in a specific smart material actuator, namely IPMC, but also serve as a guideline to demonstrate the techniques in which many more issues around developing future smart material actuators can be solved. Traditionally actuators are well known and understood and so designing mechanical devices is almost trivial, however developing ‘smart’ devices for complex medical applications requires designing from a fundamental standpoint. This research-design-development process is described in this book.
To this end, six biomedical device prototypes have been developed, by first creating a new physics based, design oriented model of the IPMC actuators themselves, in order to be able to completely simulate the system and prove the design before committing to implementation. Following from this, new controller algorithms (specific for each application) are developed, which use the fundamental IPMC model coupled with the mechanism dynamics model, in order to control the extremely complex, nonlinear and time-varying IPMC system.
