Dr Irfan Khan

Irfan Khan received his BE degree in Mechatronics Engineering from NUST in May 2009. He got his Master Degree in Mechatronics Engineering from AUS in October 2013. During his master thesis, he worked on nonlinear robust control and torsional vibration suppression in elastic drive systems. He started PhD in November 2013. During his PhD, he is working on structural vibration suppression using hybrid active and semi-active control.

Research interests

  • Nonlinear control
  • Vibration suppression in elastic systems
  • Robotics

Current research

For the last few years, I have been working on a project to design a nonlinear hybrid controller using active actuator and a semi-active device for vibration suppression in flexible structures. The key novelty is to use the hybrid controller to enable the semi-active device to achieve a performance as close to a fully active device as possible. This is accomplished by ensuring that the active actuator can assist the semi-active in the regions where energy is required. Also, the hybrid active & semi-active controller is designed to minimise the switching of the semi-active controller. The control framework used is the immersion and invariance control technique in combination with a sliding mode control.

Displacement of mass m2 controlled to follow the reference system with the hybrid active and semi-active controller.

Active and semi-active control signals in hybrid active and semi-active controller.

Semi-active control signal in hybrid active and semi-active and semi-active controllers, (left) with respect to the relative velocity, (right) with respect to the time.

 

Publications

Journal papers

 Conference papers