System Dynamics and Control Group
Prof. Dr. Manfred Morari
The group comprises more than a dozen researchers plus a varying number of visitors and diploma students. The activities fall into five areas.
- Hybrid Systems: A new theoretical framework is developed for the analysis of systems involving dynamics, logic, constraints and heuristics ("hybrid systems") and the design of controllers and filters for such systems.
- Functional Electrical Stimulation: In collaboration with medical facilities electronic devices for sensing motion and stimulating muscles in paraplegic patients are designed, built and tested on patients.
- Anaesthesia Control Group: In collaboration with the University Hospital in Bern and industrial partners closed loop controllers for anaesthesia are designed and tested on patients during surgery.
- Active Noise and Vibration Control: The ultimate goal is the concurrent design of smart materials, actuators, sensors and algorithms to reduce the noise in different test environments mimicking real life situations: noise in a duct, noise emanating from a plate (structure born noise), and, more general, noise in a three dimensional enclosure. A robust self-contained active control device was developed which, when simply inserted into a duct, was demonstrated to lead to significant noise reduction without any need for local adjustments and adaptation.
- Chemical Process Control: The research program aims at explaining and predicting nonlinear dynamic phenomena of azeotropic distillation, modeling and control of a simulated moving bed separation process and of the particle size distribution in a emulsion polymerization process.