Articles about Mechatronics

The following are industry articles about Mechatronics - a system-level approach to designing electromechanical systems that merges mechanical, electrical, control system, and embedded software design.

Phantom of the Opera Chandelier at Venetian Hotel Thrills Audiences

 

Imagine the design parameters for a four-part object weighing 2,100 lb in freefall and safely stopping just over the heads of theater goers. Then imagine pulling off this stunt in every performance with the desired shock effect and with no one getting hurt.

 

Anyone who has seen Phantom of the Opera knows that the crashing chandelier scene in the Paris Opera House climaxes the performance. Of course, Phantom in Las Vegas’ opulent Venetian Hotel had to be bigger, scarier and more thrilling than competing productions in New York, London and Paris.

 

In what can be termed an unusual but classic mechatronics project, several contractors sought to all but crash an opera-house size chandelier in every performance at the Venetian. The chandelier has two major parts in the show. When the audience first comes in, they see a dilapidated chandelier broken into pieces to convey the sorry state of the Paris Opera House. As they are taken back in time to opera house’s glory days, the ruined chandelier – made up of four independent rings – reassembles into the beautiful chandelier it once was and ascends into the dome of the theater. As this happens, its dreary blue lights turn into warm reds.

 

Besides a few shakes and rattles, the chandelier stays put until the climax of the show when it free falls for 43 ft in 3.5 sec to just over the audience. However, before it comes to a stop, the theater goes black, leaving the audience to wonder if they are going to be struck by the plummeting chandelier. Of course it stops and within the six seconds of darkness, ascends back into the dome.

 

Read the full article in Design News

No Design 'After-thoughts' Allowed

To really achieve success in mechatronics' design, it's important to understand how the mechatronics' approach differs from conventional design approaches.

The conventional design process includes several steps: (1) need or opportunity recognition, (2) concept generation, (3) detailed design and (4) manufacture. Need is simply the set of attributes the product must fulfill. Engineering must design a product to meet that need, so concept generation is the next step. Here is where you develop a solution-independent problem statement, as well as clarify your goals and quantifiable performance objectives. You also need to identify the functions or tasks required to achieve a given outcome. Often, an innovation at a function level leads to an innovation at the full concept level, since it may open up new ways to understand problems and new avenues for pursuing solutions.

The alternatives engineers consider should cover a broad range of possibilities. To choose an alternative, you must establish your requirements — measures of performance the design must meet. Requirements can be thought of as falling into three areas: product characteristics, product life and customer use. An engineer selects the most attractive path from many concepts. Picking the first solution that comes to mind may lead you off a cliff or into a worse problem than you started with. Once you decide on the concept, you are ready to turn that concept into a set of specifications, a detailed design manufacturing can use to produce the final product.

Read the full article in Design News

Mechatronics Resolves Design Challenges

Intense global competition is putting pressure on machine builders to deliver machines with higher throughput, reduced operating cost, increased safety and more features that improve productivity and differentiate their machines from the competition. For this reason, today’s machine builders have switched from designing rigid, single-purpose machines that rely purely on mechanical gears and cams to creating flexible multipurpose machines by adopting modern control systems and servomotors.

Along with designing the machine mechanicals, machine builders now incorporate control logic, human machine interfaces (HMIs), networking, machine condition monitoring and Web reporting systems into their designs. Although these additions have made machines more adaptable, they have also introduced a significant amount of complexity to the machine design process. The added complexity has created inefficiencies that increase design time, cost, and risk.

Solving this multidisciplinary engineering challenge requires improvements in three key areas: development techniques, design tools and embedded control technology. The term “mechatronics” is gaining in popularity as a way to describe this evolution. Mechatronics represents an industry-wide effort to improve the machine design process by integrating the best available development practices and technologies to streamline machine design, prototyping and deployment.

Read the full article in Control Engineering

Sylvania Lighting’s “Bright Idea” Control System

One of the world’s largest light source manufacturers, Sylvania Lighting International (SLI) is constantly pushing the limits of both product size and manufacturing methods.

A good example is its plant in Tienen, Belgium, where the company develops and produces metal halide lamps. Engineers there recently set out to design a smaller lamp, which triggered a need for a  production machine that would easily adapt to all process parameters.

The development team ruled out the standard “pinch process,” in which two metal blocks press melted glass around electrode-foil wires to create an impermeable bond. Instead, engineers developed a new process to melt the glass directly around the foil. This required a totally new machine and an optimized production process.

Read the full article in Design News

Tools for Simulating Mechatronics

Though mechatronics promises more efficient machines at a lower cost, following the mechatronics’ approach of integrated design has been challenging for most machine builders. The premise of mechatronics is based on the ability of mechanical, electrical, control design and embedded programming engineers to collaborate their design efforts. However, collaboration requires them to share and validate design ideas and effectively sharing ideas requires design tool integration. This dilemma has kept most machine builders away from following the mechatronics’ design approach.

Fortunately, design tool vendors are now helping to overcome this dilemma by providing integration between their software packages. This is allowing machine builders to follow the mechatronics’ approach while continuing to use the best-in-class design software for different design disciplines. An example of design tool integration that is enabling mechatronics is the pioneer interfaces National Instruments and SolidWorks jointly developed to integrate their control design and mechanical design software packages.

Read the full article in Mechatronics Zone

The Culinary Art of Mechatronics

Today, we’re going to talk about some of the hardware and software ingredients that go into mechatronic projects. For mechatronics, software includes the operating system (OS), application programs, and instrument drivers.

You need software tools to assemble the software as well. Microprocessors understand “machine code” — lists of instructions written as “op-codes” embodied in digital bits loaded into the computer’s memory registers.

While many computer scientists, and some engineers, still know how to program these machines directly, nobody wants to. Application source code is written in “human readable”, “third-generation languages” (3GL) like BASIC, C, and Fortran. Control engineers are better off with fourth-generation languages (4GL). Examples are Eclipse (open source), LabVIEW (from National Instruments), and any of the vendor-specific implementations of the IEC controller languages.

Read the full article in Control Engineering

 

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