| 1. |
- Kahlin, Magnus
(författare)
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Fatigue Performance of Additive Manufactured Ti6Al4V in Aerospace Applications
- 2017
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Additive Manufacturing (AM) for metals includes is a group of production methodst hat use a layer-by-layer approach to directly manufacture final parts. In recent years, the production rate and material quality of additive manufactured materials have improved rapidly which has gained increased interest from the industry to use AM not only for prototyping, but for serial production. AM offers a greater design freedom, compared to conventional production methods, which allows for parts with new innovative design. This is very attractive to the aerospace industry, in which parts could be designed to have reduced weight and improved performance contributing to reduced fuel consumption, increased payload and extended flight range. There are, however, challenges yet to solve before the potential of AM could be fully utilized in aerospace applications. One of the major challenges is how to deal with the poor fatigue behaviour of AM material with rough as-built surface.The aim of this thesis is to increase the knowledge of how AM can be used for high performance industrial parts by investigating the fatigue behaviour of the titanium alloy Ti6Al4V produced with different AM processes. Foremost, the intention is to improve the understanding of how rough as-built AM surfaces in combination with AM built geometrical notches affects the fatigue properties.This was done by performing constant amplitude fatigue testing to compare different combinations of AM material produced by Electron Beam Melting(EBM) and Laser Sintering (LS) with machined or rough as-built surfaces with or without geometrical notches and Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) treatment. Furthermore, the material response can be different between constant amplitude and variable amplitude fatigue loading due to effects of overloads and local plastic deformations. The results from constant amplitude testing were used to predict the fatigue life for variable amplitude loading by cumulative damage approach and these predictions were then verified by experimental variable amplitude testing.The constant amplitude fatigue strength of material with rough as-built surfaces was found to be 65-75 % lower, compared to conventional wrought bar, in which HIP treatments had neglectable influence on the fatigue strength. Furthermore, the fatigue life predictions with cumulative damage calculations showed good agreement with the experimental results which indicates that a cumulative damage approach can be used, at least for a tensile dominated load sequences, to predict the fatigue behaviour of additive manufactured Ti6Al4V.
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| 2. |
- Kanesund, Jan-erik
(författare)
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Influence of deformation and environmental degradation of Inconel 792
- 2017
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Industrial gas turbines are often used as a mechanical drive for pumps and compressors or in power generation as an electric power supply. The gas turbine has for many years been a popular engine due to its flexibility with respect to different types of fuel and due to a design, that enables a high power-to-weight ratio. A simplified description of a gas turbine is that the engine consists of a cold and hot section. The turbo compressor section belongs to cold section and the combustion chamber together with the turbine section belongs to the hot section. In the hot section of a gas turbine, the condition is extremely severe because of an aggressive environment characterized by high temperatures, increased temperature gradients, high pressure and centrifugal forces resulting in large stresses on individual components together with an oxidizing and corroding atmosphere. Materials used in the high temperature section (hot gas path) of a modern gas turbine are different types of superalloys, as single crystal, directionally solidified or polycrystalline alloys, depending on temperature and load conditions. In the first turbine stage, temperature is very high due to exposure to the combustion gas. To handle the problem with creep, single crystal superalloys are often used in this section. In the second row of turbine blades, the temperature of the gas is lower and polycrystalline superalloys are typically used. IN-792 is a cast polycrystalline superalloy with high strength, good resistance to hot corrosion and a cheaper option than single crystals. In the hot section of gas turbine, IN-792 is a suitable material for components such as turbine blades and vans where a complex load condition, high temperature and severe environment prevails. Due to startup and shutdown of the gas turbine engine during service, the components in the hot section are exposed to cyclic load and temperature. This will generate mechanical and thermal fatigue damage in gas turbine components. Steady state temperature gradient arises by the cooling system acting at cold spots during service to introduce tensile stress, which indirectly gives rise to creep damage in the component. This work includes tree studies of deformation and damage mechanisms of superalloy IN-792. The first study is made on test bars exposed to thermomechanical fatigue in laboratory environment, the second and the third study is made on turbine blades used during service. In the second study, the machines are placed off-shore and exposed to marine environment. In the third study the machine is landbased and exposed to an industrial environment. In the second study, the deformation and damage mechanisms are compared between the turbine blades used during service and the test bars exposed to thermomechanical fatigue testing in the first study.
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| 3. |
- Hagman, Linda, 1991-
(författare)
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How do biogas solutions influence the sustainability of bio-based industrial systems?
- 2018
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Biomass is a valuable and limited resource that should be used efficiently. The potential of replacing fossil-based products with bio-based ones produced in biobased industrial systems is huge. One important aim of increasing the share of biobased products is to improve the sustainability of systems for production and consumption. Therefore, it is important to evaluate what solutions are available to improve the sustainability performance of bio-based industrial systems, and if they also bring negative impacts. The thesis focuses on assessing the role of biogas solutions in developing sustainable bio-based systems. Such assessments are often quite narrow in their scope and focus on quantitative environmental or economic aspects. This thesis aims at also including feasibility related aspects involving the contextual conditions that are assessed more qualitatively. Biogas solutions are identified as a versatile approach to treat organic materials which are generated in large volumes in bio-based industrial systems. The results show that biogas solutions in bio-based industrial systems (i) improve circular flows of energy and nutrients, (ii) are especially viable alternatives when the quality of the by-product streams become poorer, and (iii) may improve the profitability of the bio-based industrial system. To perform better assessments of these systems, it seems valuable to broaden the set of indicators assessed and include feasibility-related indicators, preferably through the involvement of relevant stakeholders as they contribute with different perspectives and can identify aspects that influence the sustainability in different areas. Future studies could benefit from applying those broader assessments on more cases to build on a more generalisable knowledge base.
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| 4. |
- Cheng, Hei Victor
(författare)
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Aspects of Power Allocation in Massive MIMO
- 2016
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The past decades have seen a rapid growth of mobile data trac, both in terms of connected devices and data rate. To satisfy the ever growing data trac demand in wireless communication systems, the current cellular systems have to be redesigned to increase both spectral eciency and energy eciency. Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output) is one solution that satisfy both requirements. In massive MIMO systems, hundreds of antennas are employed at the base station to provide service to many users at the same time and frequency. This enables the system to serve the users with uniformly good quality of service simultaneously, with low-cost hardware and without using extra bandwidth and energy. To achieve this, proper resource allocation is needed. Among the available resources, transmit power is one of the most important degree of freedom to control the spectral eciency and energy eciency. Due to the use of excessive number of antennas and low-end hardware at the base station, new aspects of power allocation compared to current systems arises. In the rst part of the thesis, a new uplink power allocation schemes that based on long term channel statistics is proposed. Since quality of the channel estimates is crucial in massive MIMO, in addition to data power allocation, joint power allocation that includes the pilot power as additional variable should be considered. Therefore a new framework for power allocation that matches practical systems is developed, as the methods developed in the literature cannot be applied directly to massive MIMO systems. Simulation results conrm the advantages brought by the the proposed new framework. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the eects of using low-end ampliers at the base stations. The non-linear behavior of power consumption in these ampliers changes the power consumption model at the base station, thereby changes the power allocation. Two dierent scenarios are investigated and both results show that a certain number of antennas can be turned o in low load scenarios.
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| 5. |
- Evestedt, Niclas
(författare)
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Sampling Based Motion Planning for Heavy Duty Autonomous Vehicles
- 2016
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The automotive industry is undergoing a revolution where the more traditional mechanical values are replaced by an ever increasing number of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) where advanced algorithms and software development are taking a bigger role. Increased safety, reduced emissions and the possibility of completely new business models are driving the development and most automotive companies have started projects that aim towards fully autonomous vehicles. For industrial applications that provide a closed environment, such as mining facilities, harbors, agriculture and airports, full implementation of the technology is already available with increased productivity, reliability and reduced wear on equipment as a result. However, it also gives the opportunity to create a safer working environment when human drivers can be removed from dangerous working conditions. Regardless of the application an important part of any mobile autonomous system is the motion planning layer. In this thesis sampling-based motion planning algorithms are used to solve several non-holonomic and kinodynamic planning problems for car-like robotic vehicles in different application areas that all present different challenges.First we present an extension to the probabilistic sampling-based Closed-Loop Rapidly exploring Random Tree (CL-RRT) framework that significantly increases the probability of drawing a valid sample for platforms with second order differential constraints. When a tree extension is found infeasible a new acceleration profile that tries to brings the vehicle to a full stop before the collision occurs is calculated. A resimulation of the tree extension with the new acceleration profile is then performed. The framework is tested on a heavy-duty Scania G480 mining truck in a simple constructed scenario.Furthermore, we present two different driver assistance systems for the complicated task of reversing with a truck with a dolly-steered trailer. The first is a manual system where the user can easily construct a kinematically feasible path through a graphical user interface. The second is a fully automatic planner, based on the CL-RRT algorithm where only a start and goal position need to be provided. For both approaches, the internal angles of the trailer configuration are stabilized using a Linear Quadratic (LQ) controller and path following is achieved through a pure-pursuit control law. The systems are demonstrated on a small-scale test vehicle with good results.Finally, we look at the planning problem for an autonomous vehicle in an urban setting with dense traffic for two different time-critical maneuvers, namely, intersection merging and highway merging. In these situations, a social interplay between drivers is often necessary in order to perform a safe merge. To model this interaction a prediction engine is developed and used to predict the future evolution of the complete traffic scene given our own intended trajectory. Real-time capabilities are demonstrated through a series of simulations with varying traffic densities. It is shown, in simulation, that the proposed method is capable of safe merging in much denser traffic compared to a base-line method where a constant velocity model is used for predictions.
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| 6. |
- Karlsson, Marcus, 1988-
(författare)
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Aspects of Massive MIMO
- 2016
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Next generation cellular wireless technology faces tough demands: increasing the throughput and reliability without consuming more resources, be it spectrum or energy. Massive mimo (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) has proven, both in theory and practice, that it is up for the challenge. Massive mimo can offer uniformly good service to many users using low-end hardware, simultaneously, without increasing the radiated power compared to contemporary system. In Massive mimo, the base stations are equipped with hundreds of antennas. This abundance of antennas brings many new, interesting aspects compared to single-user mimo and multi-user mimo. Some issues of older technologies are nonexistent in massive mimo, while new issues in need of solutions arise. This thesis considers two aspects, and how these aspects differ in a massive mimo context: physical layer security and transmission of system information. First, it is shown that a jammer with a large number of antennas can outperform a traditional, single-antenna jammer in degrading the legitimate link. The excess of antennas gives the jammer opportunity to find and exploit structure in signals to improve its jamming capability. Second, for transmission of system information, the vast number of antennas prove useful even when the base station does not have any channel state information, because of the increased availability of space-time coding. We show how transmission without channel state information can be done in massive mimo by using a fixed precoding matrix to reduce the pilot overhead and simultaneously apply space-time block coding to use the excess of antennas for spatial diversity.
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| 7. |
- Larsson, L. Viktor
(författare)
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Control Aspects of Complex Hydromechanical Transmissions : with a Focus on Displacement Control
- 2017
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis deals with control aspects of complex hydromechanical transmissions. The overall purpose is to increase the knowledge of important aspects to consider during the development of hydromechanical transmissions to ensure transmission functionality. These include ways of evaluating control strategies in early design stages as well as dynamic properties and control aspects of displacement controllers, which are key components in these systems.Fuel prices and environmental concerns are factors that drive research on propulsion in heavy construction machinery. Hydromechanical transmissions are strong competitors to conventional torque-converter transmissions used in this application today. They offer high efficiency and wide speed/torque conversion ranges, and may easily be converted to hybrids that allow further fuel savings through energy recuperation. One challenge with hydromechanical transmissions is that they offer many different configurations, which in turn makes it important to enable evaluation of control aspects in early design stages. In this thesis, hardware-in-the-loop simulations, which blend hardware tests and standard software-based simulations, are considered to be a suitable method. A multiple-mode transmission applied to a mid-sized construction machine is modelled and evaluated in offline simulations as well as in hardware-in-the-loopsimulations.Hydromechanical transmissions rely on efficient variable pumps/motors with fast, accurate displacement controllers. This thesis studies the dynamic behaviour of the displacement controller in swash-plate axial-piston pumps/motors. A novel control approach in which the displacement is measured with an external sensor is proposed. Performance and limitations of the approach are tested in simulations and in experiments. The experiments showed a significantly improved performance with a controller that is slightly more advanced than a standard proportional controller. The implementation of the controller allows simple tuning and good predictability of the displacement response.
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| 8. |
- Ljungqvist, Oskar, 1990-
(författare)
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On motion planning and control for truck and trailer systems
- 2019
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the last decades, improved sensor and hardware technologies as well as new methods and algorithms have made self-driving vehicles a realistic possibility in the near future. Thanks to this technology enhancement, many leading automotive and technology companies have turned their attention towards developing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and self-driving vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are expected to have their first big impact in closed areas, such as mines, harbors and loading/offloading sites. In such areas, the legal requirements are less restrictive and the surrounding environment is more controlled and predictable compared to urban areas. Expected positive outcomes include increased productivity and safety, reduced emissions and the possibility to relieve the human from performing complex or dangerous tasks. Within these sites, different truck and trailer systems are used to transport materials. These systems are composed of several interconnected modules, and are thus large and highly unstable while reversing. This thesis addresses the problem of designing efficient motion planning and feedback control frameworks for such systems.First, a cascade controller for a reversing truck with a dolly-steered trailer is presented. The unstable modes of the system is stabilized around circular equilibrium configurations using a gain-scheduled linear quadratic (LQ) controller together with a higher-level pure pursuit controller to enable path following of piecewise linear reference paths. The cascade controller is then used within a rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) framework and the complete motion planning and control framework is demonstrated on a small-scale test vehicle.Second, a path following controller for a reversing truck with a dolly-steered trailer is proposed for the case when the obtained motion plan is kinematically feasible. The control errors of the system are modeled in terms of their deviation from the nominal path and a stabilizing LQ controller with feedforward action is designed based on the linearization of the control error model. Stability of the closed-loop system is proven by combining global optimization, theory from linear differential inclusions and linear matrix inequality techniques.Third, a systematic framework is presented for analyzing stability of the closed-loop system consisting of a controlled vehicle and a feedback controller, executing a motion plan computed by a lattice planner. When this motion planner is considered, it is shown that the closed-loop system can be modeled as a nonlinear hybrid system. Based on this, a novel method is presented for analyzing the behavior of the tracking error, how to design the feedback controller and how to potentially impose constraints on the motion planner in order to guarantee that the tracking error is bounded and decays towards zero.Fourth, a complete motion planning and control solution for a truck with a dolly-steered trailer is presented. A lattice-based motion planner is proposed, where a novel parametrization of the vehicle’s state-space is proposed to improve online planning time. A time-symmetry result is established that enhance the numerical stability of the numerical optimal control solver used for generating the motion primitives. Moreover, a nonlinear observer for state estimation is developed which only utilizes information from sensors that are mounted on the truck, making the system independent of additional trailer sensors. The proposed framework is implemented on a full-scale truck with a dolly-steered trailer and results from a series of field experiments are presented.
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| 9. |
- Ewest, Daniel
(författare)
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Modelling and experimental evaluation of non-linear fatigue crack propagation in a ductile superalloy
- 2016
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Fatigue life evaluation is an important part in the design process of an industrial gas turbine. The fatigue life can be divided into crack initiation and crack propagation, and not to address the crack propagation part usually yields a non-conservative and overcomplicated design. Historically a lot of attention has been directed towards the crack initiation, but the crack propagation part in an industrial gas turbine context has not been given the same attention due to limitations in theoretical modelling, lack of test possibilities and that the design requirements have been fulfilled within the initiation life. However, with the need to reduce service down time and to improve performance, the crack propagation life needs to be further accounted for. As an example, cracks that emerge from notches or other stress concentrations grow under non-elastic conditions, which cannot be modelled with linear theories.In this Licentiate of Engineering thesis a non-linear approach is put forward in which the plastic contribution in fatigue crack propagation is addressed and accounted for. The theoretical background is not new, but the finite element implementation done was, to the author knowledge, not available. This numerical post processing tool can calculate the non-linear ΔJ value for an arbitrary 2D-geometry. It was used to produce an expression for a non-linear geometry factor used in a simple expression for estimation of ΔJ in a test evaluation context. Room temperature tests were performed on a single notch specimen, under both displacement and force control. The latter were carried out in order to show the behaviour under small scale yielding conditions, while the displacement controlled testing was to show large scale yielding at the beginning of the tests. It was shown that all the test results could be collected in a Paris law type plot with ΔJ if the crack closure effect is taken into account. Furthermore, a study was performed where both a linear and a non-linear approach are applied on the displacement controlled tests. It was concluded that for the studied test series, the linear fatigue fracture parameter ΔK underestimates the crack growth behaviour if the elasto-plastic stresses from the tests are used, hence yielding non-conservative results.Since this project focuses on non-linear crack propagation at thermo-mechanical conditions a crack length description is put forward, which simplifies and increases the accuracy of crack length measurements in fatigue crack propagation tests. It has also been shown that irrespectively of the crack initiation location in a single edge notch specimen the data fall on one curve, meaning that no care has to be taken regarding this aspect when evaluating crack length with the modified compliance method put forward in Paper III.This Licentiate of Engineering thesis consists of two parts, where Part I gives an introduction to the subject, while Part II consists of three papers.
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| 10. |
- Palmert, Frans, 1986-
(författare)
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Crack growth in single crystal nickel base superalloys under isothermal and thermomechanical fatigue
- 2019
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This work concerns the fatigue crack growth behaviour of nickel base single crystal superalloys. The main industrial application of this class of materials is in gas turbine blades, where the ability to withstand severe mechanical loading in combination with high temperatures is required. In order to ensure the structural integrity of gas turbine blades, knowledge of the fatigue crack growth behaviour under service-like conditions is of utmost importance. The aim of the present work is both to improve the understanding of the crack growth behaviour of single crystal superalloys and also to improve the testing and evaluation methodology for crack propagation under thermomechanical fatigue loading conditions. Single crystal superalloys have anisotropic mechanical properties and are prone to localization of inelastic deformation along the close-packed planes of the crystal lattice. Under some conditions, crystallographic crack growth occurs along these planes and this is a complicating factor throughout the whole chain of crack propagation life simulation; from material data generation to component calculation. Fatigue crack growth testing has been performed, both using conventional isothermal testing methods and also using thermomechanical fatigue crack growth testing. Experimental observations regarding crystallographic crack growth have been made and its dependence on crystal orientation and testing temperature has been investigated. Quantitative crack growth data are however only presented for the case of Mode I crack growth under isothermal as well as thermomechanical fatigue conditions. Microstructural investigations have been undertaken to investigate the deformation mechanisms governing the crack growth behaviour. A compliance based method for the evaluation of crack opening force under thermomechanical fatigue conditions was developed, in order to enable a detailed analysis of the test data. The crack opening force evaluation proved to be of key importance in the understanding of the crack driving force under different testing conditions.
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