Invited Session

INVITED SPEECHES

Invited Speeches:

Murrenhoff, HUBERTUS JOSEF
As of October 2008, Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Enginering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany.
As of October 1994, Executive Director of the Institute of Fluid Power Drives and Controls (IFAS) in conjunction with the corresponding chair at RWTH Aachen University, Germany.
October 1991 – September 1994, Technical Director of the companies Magnet-Schultz (MSM) and Elektromechanik (EM) in Memmingen, Germany. MSM is a manufacturer of electro-mechanical devices such as solenoids, clutches and custom-designed valves for investment industry as well as automotive, aircraft and biomedical use; EM is an independent R&D company developing and designing products for those markets. Responsible for operations at MSM and R&D at EM with more than 900 employees. In January 1993 elected to the Board as Executive Vice President.
August 1987 – September 1991, Start as Assistant to the President at HSC Controls Inc., Buffalo, NY with the assignment to special development programs and to establish an engineering management system. HSC was partly owned by Barmag AG, Remscheid, Germany and is a manufacturer of highly custom-designed servovalves and servocontrol equipment, mainly for aircraft and biomedical applications, with about 150 employees. As of August 1988 in charge of Design Engineering, R&D and Sales including the national and international representation networks as Director of Engineering and Marketing. In October 1989 elected Vice President.
November 1986 – July 1987, Trainee & Development Engineer at Barmag AG, Remscheid. Barmag is a major manufacturer of textile and plastic machinery having diversified in hydraulics and automotive equipment at that time.
April 1978 – October 1986, Research Assistant at the Institute of Hydraulics and Pneumatics (IHP) at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Involvement in R & D work on government and industry contracts. Doctoral thesis and Dr.-Ing. certificate March 1983.
As of February 1983 Chief Engineer at IHP which then employed a staff of 80 and is mainly self-funded by government and industry contracts.
October 1973 – March 1978, Study of Mechanical Engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany; Dipl.-Ing. certificate March 1978.

Ato KITAGAWA, was born in Japan. He received the Dr. of Engineering Degree in control engineering in 1978. The title of the doctoral thesis is "A study on the unsteady flow in oil pipeline". He has been a Professor of the Department of Mechanical and Control Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, since 1991. His research fields include fluid power control in mechanical system and Human-Machine cooperative system, water hydraulics, flexible actuator.
He started his research on the transient flow of pipe in 1970s. His research covered the measuring method for transient flow rate, and the high speed and accurate computing method of frequency dependent friction in oil hydraulic and pneumatic laminar pipe flow for characteristics method. His interests of research included the application areas of fluid power control. In hydraulics : the development of the hydraulic poppet-type brake pressure control valve for railway rolling stock and brake-by-wire (BBW) hydraulic system. In water hydraulics : the development of two-stages water hydraulic high-speed solenoid valve (HSSV valve) and its application to the aqua-drive system (ABS) using the PWM control.
His interests of research extended to the development of fluid power driven robots and its elements, especially rescue robot and welfare care robot. Water hydraulic wavy movement fire fighting robot, pneumatic jumping robot and hydraulic jack-up robot were examples of rescue robots. The lower limb which can partially lift the patient in a comfortable way in outdoors walk was an example of welfare care robot. The elements for robots covered the power source, control valve and actuators. "Dry Ice Power Cell" is a portable power source for pneumatic robots. "Sound Operated Directional Control Valve"is a sound-driven valve without any electric wiring. "Wound Tube Actuator" is verified to be the light and powerful and flexible.
Now, he is President of The Japan Fluid Power System Society (JFPS). He is also a member of JSME, JSAE and SICE.

Shinichi YOKOTA, Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology. 1975-Research associate, 1986-Associate Professor, and 1995-Professor of Precision and Intelligence Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology. 2006-2008, Director. Research areas: Development of new micro actuator using functional fluids, micro pumps, mechatronics systems. Fellow of JSME, Regional Editor for Japan of Elsevier B.V. Journal Sensors and Actuators A, Editorial board member of the Journal of Systems and Control Engineering, IMechE, Donald Julius Groen Prize winner 2006.

Ming Chang Shih, Professor Ming Chang Shih has founded the Fluid Power Control Lab. at Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University in 1985 and has been as an active researcher in Fluid Power Control for 25 years long in

Taiwan

. His researching group has achieved many fluid power projects, which are mainly supported by National Science Council,

Taiwan

and also cooperated with industry. Specially, he has achieved his research on servo pneumatic systems, incl., nanometer positioning of the pneumatic actuators. He has published his research results in many international journals, e.g. International Journal of JSME, IMechE, International Journal of Mechatronics (U.K.) and CSME. Professor Shih has also presented a plenary lecture about servo pneumatic system at international conference of JFPS in 2002. He has got the first engineering paper Award from CSE (Chinese Society of Engineering), in 2007. Now, he has also act as project leader, incl., active,semi-active electronic hydraulic suspension system control of personal car, anti block braking control system of motorcycle and precise control of pneumatic automation manipulator about medical cell apparatus. He has devoted himself on the research of fluid power control system, besides, he also likes to play golf at his leisure time.

Siegfried Helduser, Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Siegfried Helduser is director of the Institute of Fluid Power and Motion Control of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technische Universität Dresden. He joined the Technische Universität Dresden in August 1st, 1993 when he was appointed to the chair of Hydraulics/Pneumatics. Since December 1st, 1997, he has been the head of the newly founded Institute of Fluid Power and Motion Control.
Professor Helduser studied mechanical engineering, specialised in manufacturing technology at the University RWTH Aachen and got his diploma in 1971. After six years of scientific work as a researcher at the Institute for Hydraulic and Pneumatic Drives and Controls (IHP) of the RWTH Aachen, headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. h.c. mult. W. Backé, he received his doctor degree in 1977 with the subject “Influence of the elasticity of mechanical structural elements on the dynamic performance of hydraulic servosystems”. In recognition of his achievements, he was awarded the Borchers Medal of the RWTH Aachen. From 1977 to 1980, he worked as Deputy Director at the IHP.
In April 1980, he started his career in industry which lasted more than 13 years. He worked with Vickers Systems in Bad Homburg for about ten years, his last position was Director Technology Development.
In addition to his professional work, Professor Helduser is involved in several honory positions in industry and in research organisations. He works as a consultant for several organisations and companies and was appointed expert for the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) in several cases. He also has been a member in the technical-scientific advisory commitee of the magazine “Ölhydraulik und Pneumatik” since 1994 and of the magazine “antriebstechnik” since 2003. In 2005 he became editor of the magazine “Ölhydraulik und Pneumatik”. Professor Helduser is organizer of the “Internationales Fluidtechnisches Kolloquium”, the leading German conference on fluid power. He is author of numerous publications in the field of fluid power.

Monika vantysynova, Dr. Monika Ivantysynova is the Maha Professor of Fluid Power Systems and Director of the Maha Fluid Power Research Center at Purdue University. She holds a joint appointment in the School of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. She is a thrust leader of the NSF funded Engineering Research Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power (CCEFP). She graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Slovak Technical University Bratislava in 1979 and completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Slovak Technical University Bratislava in 1983. She worked in the fluid power industry for seven years, and returned to academia in 1991. In 1996 she received a Professorship in fluid power & control at the University of Duisburg, Germany, and became in 1999 a Professor of Mechatronic Systems at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg,Germany, where she established a comprehensive fluid power research laboratory. Her research activities focus on two major areas – advanced energy saving hydraulic actuators and new drive systems and the investigation of physical processes in positive displacement pumps and motors, including the modeling of flow phenomena in narrow lubricating gaps and pump noise sources.
The current research also includes the development of new system and control concepts for hydraulic hybrid power trains. She has written a book on hydrostatic pumps and motors, has published more than 100 papers in technical journals and at international conferences. Dr. Ivantysynova is editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Fluid Power and an initiator and scientific board member of the first virtual network of fluid power research and education centers world wide, the Fluid Power Net International(FPNI).
With her outstanding research in fluid power, Dr. Monika Ivantysynova earned worldwide reputation as one of the top scientists in the development of advanced energy saving actuator and drive technology and the development of computer based design and optimization methods for displacement machines. Current activities in the systems area include projects on new circuit solutions, appropriate mathematical modelling and simulation strategies, advanced actuator and drive line control concepts, as well as methods for online prognostics and condition monitoring for agricultural and other mobile machines. Her second research field focuses on pumps and motors, especially the development of computer based design and optimization methods for displacement machines to reduce the energy dissipation by advanced macro and micro surface design of tribological systems of pumps, the development of model based methods for reduction of noise, and advanced pump control concepts. She successfully built one of the world’s largest fluid power research laboratories with pump and motor test rigs, actuator test rigs, special test rigs for investigation of tribological systems, several hydrostatic transmission test rigs, and a boom and drive line control test rig. In September 2004 she moved this $5M worth of laboratory equipment with nine well instrumented test rigs from Germany to Purdue University, where she has established the new MAHA Fluid Power Research Center on lab area of 1800 m2 off campus.

Andrew Plummer, Professor of Machine Systems
Director, Centre for Power Transmission and Motion Control
University of Bath, UK
The Centre for PTMC was founded as the Fluid Power Centre in 1968. It has an international reputation as a centre of excellence in fluid power, power transmission and motion control. The Centre has a wide range of research activities funded by industry, the UK government and the European Union.
Andrew Plummer received his PhD degree from the University of Bath in 1991, for research in the field of adaptive control of electrohydraulic systems. He worked as a research engineer for Rediffusion Simulation (now Thales Training and Simulation) developing motion and control loading system technology, before taking up a lecturing post in Control Systems and Mechatronics at the University of Leeds, UK. From 1999 he was global control systems R&D manager for Instron, manufacturers of materials and structural testing systems. Here he developed a number novel model-based control methods for high performance electrohydraulic test systems, including crash-testing catapults, Formula One racing car test rigs, earthquake simulation tables, and both very high speed and high frequency materials testing machines.
Professor Plummer was appointed to his present position in 2006. He has a variety of current research interests in the field of motion and force control, including inverse-model based control of electrohydraulic servosystems, control of parallel kinematic mechanisms, model-in-the-loop testing, hybrid hydraulic/piezoelectric actuation, optimised power transmission design and control for wave energy converters and active vehicle control. He is Vice-Chair of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) Mechatronics Informatics and Control Group, and sits on the editorial board for the IMechE Journal of Systems and Control Engineering.

Tapio Virvalo, Tapio Virvalo received the MS in mechanical engineering from Helsinki University of Technology, Finland in 1967. The licentiate of technology degree he got in 1973 also in Helsinki University of Technology. The degree of the doctor of technology he received in 1995 from Tampere University of Technology, Finland. He has served as research manager at mining machines manufacturing company, as marketing manager at hydraulic components and system manufacturing company and as chief of planning depart¬ment at tools, machine automation equipment and robots manufacturing company in Finland. He has been the member of the boards of many Finnish fluid power as well as automation companies. He has acted as a technology expert in numerous Finnish and international companies as well as a chairman and member of organization and program committees of international fluid power and mechatronics conferences. He is presently as the professor of machine automation in department of Intelligent Hydraulics and Automation (IHA) at Tampere University of Technology. His current research interests are motion control, especially, in fluid power applications including pneumatics and water hydraulics. His long term interests have also been in mechatronics and control engineering. He has published numerous international articles and conference papers.