Reported by School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering
Edited by CAI Zhen
Updated: 2012-1-19
Ph.D. student, Lifang Li, supervised by Professor Zongquan Deng at the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, recently won an award for the Best Compliant Mechanisms Paper at the ASME 2011 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE) the past August in Washington, DC, US. The paper is titled as “A Novel Approach for Designing Parabolic Mirrors Using Optimized Compliant Bands,” by Lifang Li, Andres Kecskemethy, A.F.M. Arif, and Steven Dubowsky. Also, Lifang Li is the corresponding author.
IDETC/CIE is the most influential international conference in the field of mechanical engineering design in the world. It was held by the American Society Mechanical Engineering (ASME). The conference consists of 13 meetings of mechanical engineering, including the 23rd Biennial Conference on Mechanical Vibration and Noise (VIB), 31st Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (CIE), 2011 ASME/IEEE International Conference on Mechatronic and Embedded Systems and Applications (MESA2011), 8th International Conference on Multibody Systems, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Control (MSNDC), 37th Design Automation Conference (DAC), 11th ASME International Power Transmission and Gearing Conference (PTG), 21st Reliability, Stress Analysis, and Failure Prevention Conference (RSAFP), 35th Mechanisms and Robotics Conference (MECH), 5th International Conference on Micro- and Nanosystems (MNS), 8th International Conference on Design and Design Education (DEC), 23rd International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM), 16th Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Conference (DFMLC), 13th International Conference on Advanced Vehicle and Tire Technologies (AVTT). The conference was divided into more than 300 workshops and 20 academic boards. The discussion contains the cut edges of the academic research achievements as well as industrial cases. More than 1200 scholars and industrial representatives from over 40 countries and districts attended the conference.
The conference set up five awards, to grant five papers. The award won by Lifang Li certifies that her research in the field of flexible mechanisms has the leading authority in the world. The awarded paper presents a new concept for designing and fabricating precision parabolic trough mirrors from flexible bands. Also a new shape optimization method combining finite element methods and Fourier series is approved in the paper.
Her research was done at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while she was a visiting student there, fellowshipped by China Scholarship Committee and MIT. The work was finished under combined supervision of Professor Steven Dubowsky at MIT and Professor Zongquan Deng at HIT. The work was also patented by US in 2011.
Award certificate
Paper Abstract
Parabolic concentrator mirrors are an important component of many solar energy systems, particularly solar mirror collectors. Precision parabolic mirrors are expensive to fabricate and to transport. Here, a new concept for designing and fabricating precision parabolic mirrors is presented. The mirror is formed from a thin flat very flexible metal sheet with a highly reflective surface. Attached to the rear surface of the mirror sheet is a backbone band whose figure is optimized to form the reflective sheet into a precision parabola when its two ends are pulled toward each other. An analytical model to optimize the shape of the band is presented. The validity of the concept is demonstrated using Finite Element Analysis and laboratory experiments. The concept would permit flat mirror elements to be easily fabricated and efficiently packaged and shipped to field sites and assembled into the parabolic trough concentrators with potentially substantial costs reductions compared with conventional methods.
