Advanced instrumentation and control of piezoceramic and shape memory alloy materials

This dissertation reports on four advanced topics in intelligent materials, 1) an innovative miniature piezoceramic amplifier, 2) a novel amplifier that can reduce the hysteretic effect of a piezoceramic actuator, 3) a new method to drive large shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators using ultracapacitors, and 4) a complete remote delivering strategy for intelligent materials experiments.;With the recent development of active sensing-based structural health monitoring, there is a need for low cost, low power, battery-operated piezoceramic amplifier. Commercial solutions dedicated to piezoceramic actuators do not currently provide a solution. Thus, an innovative miniature battery-operated piezoceramic amplifier was built. The miniature amplifier was developed to perform voltage amplification while running on batteries and providing a bandwidth of 7.4k [Hz] at +/-180 [V] output voltage.;Piezoceramic actuators exhibit hysteresis, which adversely impacts positioning accuracy or stability; however, existing amplifiers cannot reduce this nonlinearity. A novel miniature piezoceramic amplifier with built-in optimal feedback current control was designed to reduce the hysteresis and total harmonic distortion of piezoceramic actuators. Results showed an overall hysteresis reduction, calculated between actuator input to piezoceramic sensor output, of up to 60% in the 10 to 3k [Hz] frequency range, and a reduction of total harmonic distortion of up to 16%.;Recent applications using SMA in civil and offshore engineering require generating large forces, but there is currently no efficient power delivery and storage system available for such challenging applications. Thus, a novel method to power SMA cables using ultracapacitors was designed. In addition, two temperature feedback controllers with interleaving recharge and unregulated voltage adjustment, bang-bang and PID-PWM were designed and simulated to control SMA temperature Results show that ultracapacitors are capable of efficiently controlling the temperature of 150 SMA cables for six minutes.;Although remote experiments have been reported, robust and complete delivery strategies for remote experiments for teaching and dissemination of knowledge in intelligent materials have not been successfully developed. Thus, a remote experiment system has been designed as an educational and research tool for managing online resources and teleoperation of experiments. Results from over four years of online experiments show an overall student satisfaction of 90%.