National Aerospace Laboratories

About: National Aerospace Laboratories is a facility organization based out in Bengaluru, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Coating & Corrosion. The organization has 1838 authors who have published 2349 publications receiving 36888 citations.

Understanding the anomalous behavior of Vegard's law in Ce1-xMxO2 (M = Sn and Ti; 0 < x ≤ 0.5) solid solutions.

Abstract: The dependence of the lattice parameter on dopant concentration in Ce1-xMxO2 (M = Sn and Ti) solid solutions is not linear. A change towards a steeper slope is observed around x similar to 0.35, though the fluorite structure (space group Fm3m) is preserved up to x = 0.5. This phenomenon has not been observed for Ce1-xZrxO2 solid solutions showing a perfectly linear decrease of the lattice parameter up to x = 0.5. In order to understand this behavior, the oxidation state of the metal ions, the disorder in the oxygen substructure and the nature of metal-oxygen bonds have been analyzed by XPS, Sn-119 Mossbauer spectroscopy and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. It is observed that the first Sn-O coordination shell in Ce1-xSnxO2 is more compact and less flexible than that of Ce-O. The Sn coordination remains symmetric with eight equivalent, shorter Sn-O bonds, while Ce-O coordination gradually splits into a range of eight non-equivalent bonds compensating for the difference in the ionic radii of Ce4+ and Sn4+. Thus, a long-range effect of Sn doping is hardly extended throughout the lattice in Ce1-xSnxO2. In contrast, for Ce1-xZrxO2 solid solutions, both Ce and Zr have similar local coordination creating similar rearrangement of the oxygen substructure and showing a linear lattice parameter decrease up to 50% Zr substitution. We suggest that the localized effect of Sn substitution due to its higher electronegativity may be responsible for the deviation from Vegard's law in Ce1-xSnxO2 solid solutions.

Three Model IMM-EKF for tracking targets executing evasive maneuvers

Abstract: A constant jerk model consisting of third order derivative of target position is included in IMM estimator along with constant velocity and constant acceleration models to track a maneuvering target. The motivation for including a higher order model is that agile target maneuvers are likely to have more significant higher order derivatives which lower order tracking models such as constant velocity and constant acceleration models currently in use cannot adequately handle. This has been demonstrated through numerical simulation studies. Inclusion of jerk model in the IMM algorithm shows overall better performance of the tracking filter.

Guaranteed performance in reaching mode of sliding mode controlled systems

Abstract: Conventionally, the parameters of a sliding mode controller (SMC) are selected so as to reduce the time spent in the reaching mode. Although, an upper bound on the time to reach (reaching time) the sliding surface is easily derived, performance guarantee in the state/error space needs more consideration. This paper addresses the design of constant plus proportional rate reaching law-based SMC for second-order nonlinear systems. It is shown that this controller imposes a bounding second-order error-dynamics, and thus guarantees robust performance during the reaching phase. The choice of the controller parameters based on the time to reach a desirable level of output tracking error (OTE), rather than on the reaching time is proposed. Using the Lyapunov theory, it is shown that parameter selections, based on the reaching time criterion, may need substantially larger time to achieve the OTE. Simulation results are presented for a nonlinear spring-massdamper system. It is seen that parameter selections based on the proposed OTE criterion, result in substantially quicker tracking, while using similar levels of control effort.