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Glenn Heppler

Professor
BASc, MASc, PhD (Toronto), PEng

Contact Information:

Office:  E3 4109
Phone: 519-888-4567 ext. 84648
Fax: 519-746-4791
Email:  heppler@uwaterloo.ca

 

Research Interests:

Dynamics and Control of Structures: All structures, to some degree or another, are flexible and as such are susceptible to vibration under the appropriate loading conditions. It may be earthquakes shaking buildings, or it could be high winds inducing vibration in bridges, buildings or aircraft wings, or maybe it is the vibrations caused by impact such as a tennis ball and a tennis racket. Regardless, all these systems may realize an improvement in design through an understanding of the dynamics of the structures and an appreciation of how the dynamic behaviour might be controlled.

Several research projects involving the dynamics and control of flexible structures are being pursued and a wide range of structures are being studied, ranging from flexible robotic manipulators, through civil engineering structures such as bridges and on to structures with significant gyroscopic elements such as helicopter rotors.
The study of structurally flexible robotic arms is being pursued in the context of dynamic mass capture. Dynamic mass capture is the acquisition of a payload by the robot when there is a significant nonzero relative velocity between the robot end effector and the payload. Both the modelling of the dynamics of this class of systems and the control of the system behaviour is being examined. Multilink as well as single link systems are of interest.

The dynamics and stability of structurally flexible systems that have significant gyroscopic influences are also being investigated. Examples of systems that exhibit the gyroelastic characteristics of interest are large spacecraft, some robots, and helicopter rotors.
In several projects the analysis includes nonlinear effects in the formulation and, in some cases, uses these nonlinear effects to help affect control of the structural vibration.