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Precision motion systems are at the core of various manufacturing equipment. The rapidly increasing demand for higher productivity necessitates higher control bandwidth in the motion systems to effectively reject disturbances while maintaining excellent positioning accuracy. However, most existing optimal control methods do not explicitly optimize for control bandwidth, and the classic loop-shaping method suffers from conservative designs and fails to address cross-couplings, which motivates the development of new control solutions for bandwidth optimization. This paper proposes a novel bandwidth optimal control formulation based on nonsmooth optimization for precision motion systems. Our proposed method explicitly optimizes the system's MIMO control bandwidth while constraining the H-infinity norm of the closed-loop sensitivity function for robustness. A nonsmooth optimization solver, GRANSO, is used to solve the proposed program, and an augmented quadratic programming (QP)--based descent direction search is proposed to facilitate convergence. Simulation evaluations show that the bandwidth optimal control method can achieve a 23% higher control bandwidth than conventional loop-shaping design, and the QP-based descent direction search can reduce iteration number by 60%, which illustrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Micro/Nano-positioning stages are of great importance in a wide range of manufacturing machines and instruments. In recent years, the drastically growing demand for higher throughput and reduced power consumption in various IC manufacturing equipment calls for the development of next-generation precision positioning systems with unprecedented acceleration capability while maintaining exceptional positioning accuracy and high control bandwidth. Reducing the stage's weight is an effective approach to achieving this goal. However, the reduction of stages' weight tends to decrease its structural resonance frequency, which limits the closed-loop control bandwidth and can even cause stability issues. Aiming to overcome the aforementioned challenge and thus create new lightweight precision stages with substantially improved acceleration capability without sacrificing stage control performance, this research presents a novel sequential structure and control design framework for lightweight stages with low-frequency flexible modes of the stage being actively controlled. Additional actuators and sensors are placed to actively control the flexible structural dynamics of the lightweight stage to attain high control bandwidth. A case study is simulated to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, where a stage weight reduction of 24% is demonstrated compared to a baseline case, which demonstrates the potential of the proposed design framework. Experimental evaluation of the designed stage's motion performance will be performed on a magnetically levitated linear motor platform for performance demonstration., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2301.04208; text overlap with arXiv:2309.11735

Precision motion stages play a critical role in various manufacturing and inspection equipment, for example, the wafer/reticle scanning in photolithography scanners and positioning stages in wafer inspection systems. To meet the growing demand for higher throughput in chip manufacturing and inspection, it is critical to create new precision motion stages with higher acceleration capability with high control bandwidth, which calls for the development of lightweight precision stages. However, in today's precision motion systems, only the rigid body motion of the system are under control, and the flexible dynamic systems are in open loop. For these systems, the motion control bandwidth is limited by the first structural resonance frequency of the stage, which enforces a fundamental trade-off between the stage's bandwidth and acceleration capability. Aiming to overcome this trade-off, we have introduced a sequential structure and control design framework for lightweight stages with the low-frequency flexible modes of the stage are under active control. To facilitate the controller design, we further propose to minimize the resonance frequency of the stage's mode being controlled and to maximize the resonance frequency of the uncontrolled mode. The system's control bandwidth is placed in between the resonance frequencies. This paper presents the design, optimization, building, and experimental evaluations for a lightweight magnetically levitated planar stage, which we call FleXstage, with first flexible mode actively controlled via over-actuation. Simulations show the proposed design is highly promising in enabling stages with lightweight without sacrificing control bandwidth. We have some preliminary results now and are still working on the experimental evaluations for the closed-loop system, and will present the results in the oral presentation.

This study presents a novel multimodal fusion model for three-dimensional mineral prospectivity mapping (3D MPM), effectively integrating structural and fluid information through a deep network architecture. Leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), the model employs canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to align and fuse multimodal features. Rigorous evaluation on the Jiaojia gold deposit dataset demonstrates the model's superior performance in distinguishing ore-bearing instances and predicting mineral prospectivity, outperforming other models in result analyses. Ablation studies further reveal the benefits of joint feature utilization and CCA incorporation. This research not only advances mineral prospectivity modeling but also highlights the pivotal role of data integration and feature alignment for enhanced exploration decision-making., Comment: Upon careful review, it has come to our attention that inaccuracies exist in the formulation of the structure-fluid relationships, impacting the validity of the presented results

Precision motion stages are playing a prominent role in various manufacturing equipment. The drastically increasing demand for higher throughput in integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing and inspection calls for the next-generation precision stages that have light weight and high control bandwidth simultaneously. In today's design techniques, the stage's first flexible mode is limiting its achievable control bandwidth, which enforces a trade-off between the stage's acceleration and closed-loop stiffness and thus limits the system's overall performance. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a new hardware design and control framework for lightweight precision motion stages with the stage's low-frequency flexible modes actively controlled. Our method proposes to minimize the resonance frequency of the controlled mode to reduce the stage's weight, and to maximize that of the uncontrolled mode to enable high control bandwidth. In addition, the proposed framework determines the placement of the actuators and sensors to maximize the controllability/observability of the stage's controlled flexible mode while minimizing that of the uncontrolled mode, which effectively simplifies the controller designs. Two case studies are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Simulation results show that the stage designed using the proposed method has a weight reduction of more than 55% compared to a baseline stage design. Improvement in control bandwidth was also achieved. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving lightweight precision positioning stages with high acceleration, bandwidth, and precision.

Precision motion stages are an essential part of a wide range of manufacturing equipment, and their motion performance are critical to the quality and throughput of the systems. The drastically increasing demand for higher manufacturing throughput in various processes necessities the development of next-generation motion systems with reduced moving weight and high control bandwidth. However, the reduction of moving stage's weight can lower the stage's structural resonance frequencies, making the hardware dynamics and controller design problem strongly coupled. Aiming at this challenge, this paper proposes a new formulation of nested hardware and control co-design framework for precision motion stages. The proposed framework explicitly optimizes the closed-loop control bandwidth with guaranteed robustness, and explicitly considers the limits in the physical system. Two case studies, including a motivating example using lumped-parameter mechanical system and a finite-element-simulated lightweight motion stage, are being used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed nested CCD framework. Simulation results show that the proposed nested CCD framework has 42\% of weight reduction and 28\% bandwidth improvement compared with a sequential design baseline, which demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed approach.

Hydrogen is a promising energy carrier and key agent for many industrial chemical processes1. One method for generating hydrogen sustainably is via the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), in which electrochemical reduction of protons is mediated by an appropriate catalyst-traditionally, an expensive platinum-group metal. Scalable production requires catalyst alternatives that can lower materials or processing costs while retaining the highest possible activity. Strategies have included dilute alloying of Pt2 or employing less expensive transition metal alloys, compounds or heterostructures (e.g., NiMo, metal phosphides, pyrite sulfides, encapsulated metal nanoparticles)3-5. Recently, low-cost, layered transition-metal dichalcogenides (MX2)6 based on molybdenum and tungsten have attracted substantial interest as alternative HER catalysts7-11. These materials have high intrinsic per-site HER activity; however, a significant challenge is the limited density of active sites, which are concentrated at the layer edges.8,10,11. Here we use theory to unravel electronic factors underlying catalytic activity on MX2 surfaces, and leverage the understanding to report group-5 MX2 (H-TaS2 and H-NbS2) electrocatalysts whose performance instead derives from highly active basal-plane sites. Beyond excellent catalytic activity, they are found to exhibit an unusual ability to optimize their morphology for enhanced charge transfer and accessibility of active sites as the HER proceeds. This leads to long cycle life and practical advantages for scalable processing. The resulting performance is comparable to Pt and exceeds all reported MX2 candidates.