shape control with light activated polymers using hierarchical particle swarm optimizer

What is it about?

A shape control with light activated polymers (LAPs) is designed in present article. Under ultraviolet light irradiation, the structures of crosslink networks in LAPs alter. Such alterations lead to macroscopical deformation. On this basis, LAPs possess the potential to be actuators. For shape control, so many parameters of actuators could be optimized. A three-layer hierarchical particle swarm optimizer (HPSO) algorithm is proposed to search the appropriate group of LAPs numbers, locations and lengths. Numerical simulations (monotonic function shape control and non-monotonic function shape control) illustrate that HPSO is effective

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Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The use of HPSO is particularly necessary for the structure or topology as well as the parametric optimization. Unlike the set-up of the conventional PSO optimization, where the particle swarm are assumed to be predefined, HPSO can simultaneously optimize the locations, numbers and lengths of LAPs actuators. HPSO results in more accurate configurations than those of normal PSO and HGA. Numerical simulations show that the controlled beam shapes are in good agreement with the expected ones by using the proposed method. HPSO results in the most optimal shape control results, and its computational cost is comparable to HGA and slightly higher than PSO.

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