Innovative Joining Process

The goal of this research field is to understand the phenomena guiding the evolution of the microstructures and mechanical properties in aluminum-based alloys for a particular joining process called “friction stir welding”.

Making mechanical structures lighter requires specific properties, in which lightweight alloys hardly compete with polymer-based structural composites. Historically, the approach to make aluminum alloys lighter focused on the control of microstructures. However, it is now clear that primary and secondary properties of the joining process must also be taken into account in the development of these materials.

We conduct experimental activities and multi-scale modeling to describe the thermo-mechanical cycles during soldering, and the evolution of the microstructures and related mechanical properties.

Medical Robotics

The amount of medical robotics applications exponentially raised in the past few years (e.g. in surgery, rehabilitation, assistance to impaired persons). This field is a perfect framework to combine expertise from our centre (mechanical and electromechanical design, advanced control) and from clinicians. In that respect, we have ongoing collaborations with our institutional hospital, the "Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc".

In all these projects, we pay a particular attention to develop our solutions with a "patient-oriented perspective", i.e. by including a large amount of clinical validations with patients and clinicians/therapists in the design process.

Multibody and Multiphysic Modeling

As suggested by our logo, the mechanical system is often at the heart of a complete mechatronic design (a vehicle, a robot, an actuator…). Therefore, a fine modeling of the system’s mechanics is essential. We rely on the multibody approach, in which we have a longstanding expertise of more than two decades.

We developed a dedicated software – namely ROBOTRAN – which is based on a symbolic approach, owing to flexibly export kinematic and dynamic models to dedicated environments, e.g. for optimization and control.

On top of that, we believe that the mechatronic approach does not only concern design or prototyping, but also multiphysics modeling. Multiphysics modeling requires indeed a good knowledge of the models inherent to the diverse disciplines being involved (mechanics, electromagnetism, hydraulic…) in order to provide a reliable and efficient global numerical model. This requires juggling with the different models (discrete, continuous, discretized – FEM) and determining the most relevant numerical interface, depending on the application.

Optimal Design of Mechatronic Devices

Seeking for an optimal solution in a design problem is a major preoccupation in the industry, owing to the significant economic issues related to the development of a product.In this context, assisting – or even replacing – the designer with new design tools requires the elaboration of a new research field. This is of particular interest if the problem involves multiphysics phenomena.The tools that we recently developed propose new methods in:

• Parametric optimization, in order to optimize the dimensions of a solution proposed by the designer.

• Geometrical optimization, in order to further modify the initial geometry of the designer.

• Topological optimization, in order to further explore different (and better) topologies from an initially blank space.