Connor Ligeikis
Current Institution: University of Michigan
Email: ligeikis@umich.edu
Bio: Connor Ligeikis is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, advised by Prof. Jeff Scruggs. He received his B.S.E. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 2017 and 2019, respectively. He received a second M.S. degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2021. During the summer of 2019, he worked as a research intern at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. His research interests broadly include vibration, control, mechatronics, and cyber-physical systems. He is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Abstract: Self-Powered Feedback Control Systems
A self-powered system is a control actuation technology that derives all energy to power its operations from the dynamic response of the plant in which it is embedded. In the area of civil-structural control, such energy-autonomous systems are attractive as they do not rely on any external power supply, which may be unreliable during extreme events such as earthquakes. The synthesis of feedback control laws for use with self-powered systems is challenging, as they must simultaneously achieve competing closed-loop performance and energy harvesting objectives. The control algorithms must also explicitly account for parasitic losses associated with the transmission and storage of energy. Given this context, my dissertation research has focused on: i) the identification of theoretical conditions that guarantee self-powered feasibility of feedback control laws; ii) the development of tractable approaches for the design of both linear and nonlinear self-powered feedback controllers; and iii) the experimental validation of a prototype self-powered structural control system using hardware-in-the-loop simulation.