Добірка наукової літератури з теми "Micro-factory conveyor"

Micro-factories are characterized by high modularity, reconfigurability and mobility. To achieve this, the micro-factory needs a conveyor which is able to transport objects in as many degrees of freedom (DoF) as possible, executes optimal trajectories of these objects in terms of energy and precision and is robust to withstand possible malfunctions. In this article, we present the planar conveyance of objects on a digital actuation array following trajectories generated by an adapted A* algorithm. The A* algorithm exploits the predictions of a developed dynamic model of the system to find the optimal paths (in terms of energy) on the conveyor surface. The dynamic model predictions were compared to experimental measurements, obtaining low root-mean-square-errors for all conditions. Uni-dimensional conveyance tests characterized the influence of the control parameters. Then, bi-dimensional motions characterized the conveyor’s performance. From the bi-dimensional test, a position root-mean-square-error of 20 μm was measured for a 1109 μm open-loop controlled trajectory. The modular nature of the array allows easy scaling and avoiding possible malfunctioning zones, increasing the robustness of the micro-conveyor. The experimental tests demonstrate that the proposed device is an interesting alternative for the micro-factory.

Introduction Cookbooks are more than recipes. They are valuable historical artifacts containing information about the food, culture and society that produced and used them (Driver, Theophano, Wheaton). This story is based on my first and failed attempt at using an old recipe to make a cheddar cheese. It examines the effect of changed technology on artisanal cooking practices (Supski, Giard) and how recipe writing has had to adapt to changed culinary technology. In the absence of the generational—mother to daughter—handing down of cooking practices, and an inherited understanding of traditional cooking techniques gained through practice over time, today’s recipes rely on clear written instructions, illustrations and demonstration for their success. Luce Giard’s discussion of women’s domestic work, and what she refers to as “memory of apprenticeship” (157), and the technological changes that interrupted artisanal food making, underpin the story. Using creative nonfiction this story invites the reader to appreciate how food and cooking are connected to our lives—from the local to the global, connecting food to remembering (Berzok), nostalgia (Duruz), and family relationships (Giard, Supski).My Cheddar CheeseWith their high degree of ritualization and their strong affective investment, culinary activities are for many women of all ages a place of happiness pleasure and discovery. Such life activities demand as much intelligence, imagination and memory as those traditionally held as superior, such as music and weaving (Giard 151). My first attempt at making a cheddar cheese started out as a culinary adventure—part nostalgia, part challenge and part boast. I had in mind the cloth wrapped cheddar cheese of my childhood. We called it mouse’s cheese, as even the mice preferred it to the Kraft cheddar cheese that came wrapped in foil and packaged in a box. My father would peel the cloth away from the round of cheese before cutting out a wedge from it. Then he would slice it, and lay it on buttered toast and grill it until it melted. Bubbles of cheesy oil slid off the sides of the toast, onto the bottom of the grill pan, where cold and crisp afterwards, I would pick them off and eat them. I think that it was this memory that drove my anticipation of the joy of actually making a cheese. The process not only connected me to this memory but also would give me the satisfaction of saying, “I made it myself.” Giard understood this pleasure, connecting it to the lives we lead today:when for so many people nothing remains at the end of the day except for the bitter wear and tear of so many dull hours, the preparation of a meal furnishes that rare joy of producing something oneself, of fashioning a ferment of reality, of knowing the joys of demiurgic miniaturization, all the while securing the gratitude of those who will consume it by way of pleasant and innocent seductions (158). The recipe came from a Country Women’s Association (CWA) cookbook first published in 1936 but republished with minor changes in 1982. It looked simple enough, and the fact that it was there, in amongst recipes for fresh cheeses and butter, gave me the confidence to simply follow the recipe. I would include it in a blog I had started about cooking from old recipe books. Making a cheese gave me the perfect opportunity to follow one recipe and report on its development over its six-week maturation. My followers, I thought, could come on this culinary journey with me. Day One: The Boast I am making a cheddar cheese from a CWA (Country Women’s Association) cookbook. This book, first published in 1936 has chapters on invalid cooking, household hints and a section called ‘Hints to Temper the Temper’. In the butter and cheese making section there is a recipe for a cheddar cheese. It looks so easy. Just a few ingredients: milk, rennet, salt and food colouring, and a few lines of instruction. A friend has fashioned a sort of cheese press for me—based on a picture of one we found on the internet. Yesterday I bought eight litres of organic milk and set to. The recipe is very simple: 1) Heat the milk to blood temperature, add nine rennet tablets and a teaspoon of cheese colouring. Leave it to set and harden and once that is done cut it into the curd and drain the whey off. 2) Once it is dry, add salt and turn it into a cheese press—lined with muslin—to start pressing all the excess moisture out by applying a bit more pressure each day. 3) Once all the moisture is pressed out it wrap it in waxed cheese cloth, set it in a cool place and turn it each day for six weeks.I am at the first stage and the whey is draining away. I think it will be another couple of days before I can start pressing it.In six weeks, I will have a cheese (Adams).Mary Shearer wrote in the foreword of this new 1982 edition of the original text, that the needs of the community had changed in fifty years of CWA service and this included a significant change to meet these needs, namely, a conversion of the recipes from imperial measurements to the metric system. But she expressed confidence that, with the tried recipes of many country women, “the universal appeal enjoyed since the first edition will be retained” (Foreword). Marjorie Maughan, who also wrote a message in the foreword, felt that “with the adaptability of women, the use of metric measures will be accomplished with ease and this edition will be as popular as ever.”Until I started, I had not considered failure. The recipe was included in a reliable cookery book that promised to have universal appeal and where the only possible challenge for cooks of its day would be its metric, rather than imperial, measurements. I was familiar with both metric and imperial—the only challenge mentioned in the foreword—and seduced by the simplicity of both the instructions and the ingredient list. I was soon to discover that my CWA recipe was full of omissions, assumptions, and errors.Cheese was traditionally made in many country kitchens as a way of preserving milk. The skill needed to make it was acquired through years of watching and learning. A written recipe was more of an aide memoire consisting of a list of ingredients and a few lines of simple instruction. To write recipes for today’s cooks, recipe writers usually work from test-kitchens and must include precise detail: their words are tested and edited until they are foolproof. Old recipes are full of assumed knowledge. They often lack details, leave out ingredients, do not provide measurements (or use measurements that are no longer in common usage, like a peck), and use equipment and ingredients that are no longer available or now have a different name. But as Giard writes, women are practiced at dealing with culinary challenges, “each meal demands the invention of an alternative mini-strategy when one ingredient or the appropriate utensil is lacking” (158). I soon found problems with the recipe. It called for eight litres (two gallons) new milk, a two and a half kilogram (five pound) jam tin (which would hold the cheese from six gallons of milk), salt, a teaspoon of cheese colouring, and one dessertspoon of rennet (or nine rennet tablets). What was new milk? What is cheese colouring? Where can I get rennet tablets? The recipe was imprecise: two and a half kilograms does not equate to five pounds. Where do I get a jam tin? I remember big tins of jam from my childhood but I was not sure jam was even packaged in tins these days. Why did I need a tin that would hold six gallons of milk when I only needed two gallons for this cheese? Yellow food colouring would be fine—perhaps with a drop of red to give a more orange tint to the finished cheese—and I found rennet tablets in the supermarket, but I was still unsure about the quantity of salt needed. My previously-quite-simple-recipe now had layers of complexity. There was no one I could ask, and I did not have Giard’s “memory of apprenticeship”:Yet, from the minute one becomes interested in the process of culinary production, one notices that it requires a multiple memory: a memory of apprenticeship, of witnessed gestures, and of consistencies, in order, for example, to identify the exact moment when the custard has begun to coat the back of a spoon and thus must be taken off the stove to prevent it from separating (157–58). I reasoned that if I just did exactly what the instructions said, it had to work: Warm the cheese to blood heat, add the cheese colouring and rennet and stir well. Cover with a cloth to keep in the heat. When the curd is set and firm, cut through and through with a large knife to release the whey. Dip the whey off with a saucer, pressing the curd while doing so. Drain off all the whey and when fairly dry crumble the curd and add salt to taste—about 2 teaspoons should be about sufficient (CWA 342).How hot is blood heat and do I need a thermometer? How much cheese colouring do I need? How firm is firm? How many “through and through” cuts should I make? How dry is “fairly dry”? With my cheese now doomed to fail, I searched for The Australian Dairy Board on the Internet looking for some answers. In a modern cheese factory, to ensure the cheese composition is uniform, milk is standardised: stripped then re-made with all its fats and proteins adjusted to the right proportion, although some small cheese makers do not standardise their milk. Then this milk is pasteurised to destroy all disease making micro-organisms, make the cheese safe to eat, and improve its quality. Cheese starter cultures are used (there was no mention of these in my CWA recipe) and once the milk coagulates and is cut to release the whey, it has to be stirred to release more whey. The length of time the curds are stirred is important in the process as it influences the type of cheese that was made.The women who followed my CWA recipe would have dipped a finger into the milk to test its temperature, tasted the curds for salt, and known when the colour was right. They would have just known when the cheese was pressed enough to wrap in the waxed cloth. They would have covered their day clothes with an apron—protecting their clothes from spills—rather than protecting the cheese from contamination. There would be no sterile gloves, white coats, hairnets, or thermometers in their kitchens. If I had been able to ask them questions their answer would have been, “it is done this way because it has always been done more or less like that” (Giard 171).My cheese was both lacking in salt and very pale. Perhaps, I thought, the flavour would intensify and it would darken during the maturation process. If it stayed this colour it would be the same creamy white as an English Wensleydale cheddar rather than the eggnog-coloured mouse cheeses of my childhood. The cheese press was my inspired “mini-strategy” and one step away from being experimental. It was made from 1) the back of a plastic clipboard with holes drilled into it, 2) a piece of agricultural pipe, 3) a flat circular disk of metal the same diameter as the inside of the agricultural pipe attached to a long screw, to add pressure to the cheese and, 4) a handle which allowed me to screw the piece of metal onto the top of the cheese to apply pressure and weight. I was excited to try it and I pushed on: "Line a cheese press with the cheesecloth, pack the curd into it and fold the cloth over the top. Put on a lid—a saucer that will fit in the tin will do very well—place a 3 kg (6 lb.) weight on top and press for 12 hours" (CWA: 343).I had more questions. Should I put the weighted cheese in the refrigerator for the twelve hours whilst it drained or would it be fine on the bench overnight? Three kilograms does not equal six pounds but this probably didn’t matter as I was using a press and not weights. Somewhat intuitively, I decided to leave it overnight on the bench. It was winter after all and the house would be cold once the heating went off automatically at 10.00 pm. I crossed my fingers, wrote about it in my blog and posted some pictures.Day Three: Emerging DoubtsI have just salted the cheese and put it into the press for seven days. Each day I have to increase the weight and change the cheesecloth. It’s a bit smelly …I sourced wax for the next stage and it arrived in the post today. I will keep rewrapping and pressing until the weekend then I will wax it and put it away until it matures.I am a little worried that I did not salt it enough. The recipe said two teaspoons and I wonder if it meant tablespoons. Time will tell (Adams). At this point things started to go very wrong. The cheese smelled off. Perhaps I had ruined my cheese right at the start when I left it out on the bench for its first overnight pressing. Maybe it should have been in the refrigerator. I should have added more salt. There was nothing to do but to keep going and see what happened. I could learn from mistakes, reflect on the process, and try again if it did not work. There was still the possibility that it would work; although the smell in the ’fridge suggested otherwise. Once it was coated in wax, I reasoned, it could not smell.After seven days of pressing, the cheese was now ready to be wiped well, dried, wrapped in buttered muslin, and stored in a cool place for two weeks, and turned every day. I used cheese wax instead of buttered muslin and put it in the refrigerator.The final words from CWA were: "The cheese will be ready in about six weeks, but is better if kept for three months. (A press may be made out of [the] jam tin. The bottom must be punctured, and holes punched around the tin). A wooden press is best" (342).My final words were, "Day-Seven: Failure" (Adams).I was a tad impatient and very concerned about the smell so I waxed the cheese a couple of days early and it is now stashed away in the fridge. (Sealing it in wax should stop it stinking out the fridge!) I have to turn it each day for two weeks then leave it for six. My cheese is either slowly maturing or rotting. The wax has sprung leaks and the clear liquid coming out does not smell good … but I will keep turning it daily for another four weeks (Adams).The Dairy Board instructions dictated that maturation takes place in temperature controlled cool rooms and that cheddar requires a temperature of between 8 and 10˚C for three to twenty-four months. During maturation the enzymes in the cheese break down the fats and proteins allowing the textural and flavour characteristics of the cheese to develop. My cheese sat in the refrigerator (I have no idea what the temperature is set at), where I duly turned it every day. After five weeks the stench in the refrigerator was no longer bearable as the smelly liquid had started to ooze out of the wax. I took it out and cut into it. Beneath its wax-coating my cheese had matured into a stinking mass of soft, oyster-coloured crumbly curds. I binned it, without so much as a taste. Final Post: Know Your Limitations I did make a little goat cheese and that was pretty delicious. I used the same method but I pressed it lightly for a day then wrapped it in greaseproof paper and left it in the fridge. We ate it fresh the next day (Adams).This experiment helped me realise that today’s recipe books contain detailed instructions because the knowledge of cookbook writers, including how to utilise the available technology, has to be conveyed to the reader following their recipes. Such clear instructions are necessary now, whereas in the past, cooks were drawing on skills and knowledge they either had, or could draw on other knowledge sources and networks to gain. I have not given up on making cheddar cheese. I still have the cheese press and some wax, and the cheesecloth I used is washed and folded in the cupboard. Before I do try again, however, I will consult a modern cookbook or book myself into a cheesemaking course and learn from someone who has the skills I need.References Adams. Jill. First Catch a Chicken. 2011. 1 May 2013 ‹http://firstcatchachicken.wordpress.com›.Berzok, Linda Murray. Storied Dishes: What Our Family Recipes Tell Us About Who We Are and Where We’ve Been. Oxford: Praeger, 2011.Country Women’s Association Western Australia Inc. The C.W.A. Cookery Book and Household Hints. 36th ed. Perth: Wigg, 1982.Dairy Australia. “Cheesmaking.” 2013. 20 Jan. 2013 ‹http://www.dairyaustralia.com.au/Dairy-food-and-recipes/Dairy-Products/Cheese/Cheesemaking.aspx›.De Certeau, Giard, Luce, and Mayol, Pierre. The Practice of Everyday Life Vol. 2: Living and Cooking. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.Driver, Elizabeth. “Cookbooks as Primary Sources for Writing History.” Food, Culture & Society 12.3 (2009): 257–74.Duruz, Jean. “Food as Nostalgia: Eating in the Fifties and Sixties.” Australian Historical Studies 113 (1999): 231–50.Supski, Sian. “‘We still mourn that book’: Cookbooks, Recipes and Foodmaking Knowledge in 1950’s Australia.” Journal of Australian Studies 28.84 (2005): 85–94.Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002.Wheaton, Barbara. Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. New York: Touchstone / Simon and Schuster, 1983.

In PilsenTwenty-six Station Road,She climbed to the third floorUp stairs which were all that was leftOf the whole house,She opened her doorFull on to the sky,Stood gaping over the edge.For this was the placeThe world ended.Thenshe locked up carefullylest someone stealSiriusor Aldebaranfrom her kitchen,went back downstairsand settled herselfto waitfor the house to rise againand for her husband to rise from the ashesand for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in placeIn the morning they found herstill as stone, sparrows pecking her hands.Five Minutes after the Air Raidby Miroslav Holub(Calder 287) Holding Still Detonation. Affect. During the Second World War, London and other European cities were subjected to the terrors of aerial bombardment, rendered through nightmarish anticipations of the bomber (Gollin 7) and the material storm of the real air-raid. The fall of bombs plagued cities and their citizens with the terrible rain of explosives and incendiary weapons. A volatile landscape was formed as the urban environment was ‘unmade’ and urged into violent motion. Flying projectiles of shrapnel, debris and people; avalanches of collapsing factories and houses; the inhale and exhale of compressed air and firestorms; the scream of the explosion. All these composed an incredibly fluid urban traumatic, as atmospheres fell over the cities that was thick with smoke, dust, and ventilated only by terror (see for instance Sebald 10 and Mendieta’s 3 recent commentary). Vast craters were imprinted onto the charred morphologies of London and Berlin as well as Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden. Just as the punctuations of the bombing saw the psychic as well as the material give way, writers portraying Britain as an ‘volcano island’ (Spaight 5) witnessed eruptive projections – the volleys of the material air-war; the emotional signature of charged and bitter reprisals; pain, anguish and vengeance - counter-strikes of affect. In the midst of all of this molten violence and emotion it seems impossible that a simultaneous sense of quiescence could be at all possible. More than mere physical fixity or geographical stasis, a rather different sort of experience could take place. Preceding, during and following the excessive mobilisation of an air raid, ‘stillness’ was often used to describe certain plateuing stretches of time-space which were slowed and even stopped (Anderson 740). Between the eruptions appeared hollows of calm and even boredom. People’s nervous flinching under the reverberation of high-explosive blasts formed part of what Jordan Crandall might call a ‘bodily-inclination’ position. Slackened and taut feelings condensed around people listening out for the oncoming bomber. People found that they prepared for the dreadful wail of the siren, or relaxed in the aftermath of the attack. In these instances, states of tension and apprehension as well as calm and relief formed though stillness. The peculiar experiences of ‘stillness’ articulated in these events open out, I suggest, distinctive ways-of-being which undo our assumptions of perpetually fluid subjectivities and the primacy of the ‘body in motion’ even within the context of unparalleled movement and uncertainty (see Harrison 423 and also Rose and Wylie 477 for theoretical critique). The sorts of “musics of stillness and silence able to be discovered in a world of movement” (Thrift, Still 50), add to our understandings of the material geographies of war and terror (see for instance Graham 63; Gregory and Pred 3), whilst they gesture towards complex material-affective experiences of bodies and spaces. Stillness in this sense, denotes apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that sees the body enveloped within the movement of the environment around it; bobbing along intensities that course their way through it; positioned towards pasts and futures that make themselves felt, and becoming capable of intense forms of experience and thought. These examples illustrate not a shutting down of the body to an inwardly focused position – albeit composed by complex relations and connections – but bodies finely attuned to their exteriors (see Bissell, Animating 277 and Conradson 33). In this paper I draw from a range of oral and written testimony archived at the Imperial War Museum and the Mass Observation wartime regular reports. Edited publications from these collections were also consulted. Detailing the experience of aerial bombing during the Blitz, particularly on London between September 1940 to May 1941, forms part of a wider project concerning the calculative and affective dimensions of the aeroplane’s relationship with the human body, especially through the spaces it has worked to construct (infrastructures such as airports) and destroy. While appearing extraordinary, the examples I use are actually fairly typical of the patternings of experience and the depth and clarity with which they are told. They could be taken to be representative of the population as a whole or coincidentally similar testimonials. Either way, they are couched within a specific cultural historical context of urgency, threat and unparalleled violence.Anticipations The complex material geographies of an air raid reveal the ecological interdependencies of populations and their often urban environments and metabolisms (Coward 419; Davis 3; Graham 63; Gregory The Colonial 19; Hewitt Place 257). Aerial warfare was an address of populations conceived at the register of their bio-rhythmical and metabolic relationship to their milieu (Adey). The Blitz and the subsequent Allied bombing campaign constituted Churchill’s ‘great experiment’ for governments attempting to assess the damage an air raid could inflict upon a population’s nerves and morale (Brittain 77; Gregory In Another 88). An anxious and uncertain landscape constructed before the war, perpetuated by public officials, commentators and members of parliament, saw background affects (Ngai 5) of urgency creating an atmosphere that pressurised and squeezed the population to prepare for the ‘gathering storm’. Attacks upon the atmosphere itself had been readily predicted in the form of threatening gas attacks ready to poison the medium upon which human and animal life depended (Haldane 111; Sloterdijk 41-57). One of the most talked of moments of the Blitz is not necessarily the action but the times of stillness that preceded it. Before and in-between an air raid stillness appears to describe a state rendered somewhere between the lulls and silences of the action and the warnings and the anticipatory feelings of what might happen. In the awaiting bodies, the materialites of silence could be felt as a kind-of-sound and as an atmospheric sense of imminence. At the onset of the first air-raids sound became a signifier of what was on the way (MO 408). Waiting – as both practice and sensation – imparted considerable inertia that went back and forth through time (Jeffrey 956; Massumi, Parables 3). For Geographer Kenneth Hewitt, sound “told of the coming raiders, the nearness of bombs, the plight of loved ones” (When the 16). The enormous social survey of Mass Observation concluded that “fear seems to be linked above all with noise” (original emphasis). As one report found, “It is the siren or the whistle or the explosion or the drone – these are the things that terrify. Fear seems to come to us most of all through our sense of hearing” (MO 378). Yet the power of the siren came not only from its capacity to propagate sound and to alert, but the warning held in its voice of ‘keeping silent’. “Prefacing in a dire prolepsis the post-apocalyptic event before the event”, as Bishop and Phillips (97) put it, the stillness of silence was incredibly virtual in its affects, disclosing - in its lack of life – the lives that would be later taken. Devastation was expected and rehearsed by civilians. Stillness formed a space and body ready to spring into movement – an ‘imminent mobility’ as John Armitage (204) has described it. Perched on the edge of devastation, space-times were felt through a sense of impending doom. Fatalistic yet composed expectations of a bomb heading straight down pervaded the thoughts and feelings of shelter dwellers (MO 253; MO 217). Waves of sound disrupted fragile tempers as they passed through the waiting bodies in the physical language of tensed muscles and gritted teeth (Gaskin 36). Silence helped form bodies inclined-to-attention, particularly sensitive to aural disturbances and vibrations from all around. Walls, floors and objects carried an urban bass-line of warning (Goodman). Stillness was forged through a body readied in advance of the violence these materialities signified. A calm and composed body was not necessarily an immobile body. Civilians who had prepared for the attacks were ready to snap into action - to dutifully wear their gas-mask or escape to shelter. ‘Backgrounds of expectation’ (Thrift, Still 36) were forged through non-too-subtle procedural and sequential movements which opened-out new modes of thinking and feeling. Folding one’s clothes and placing them on the dresser in-readiness; pillows and sheets prepared for a spell in the shelter, these were some of many orderly examples (IWM 14595). In the event of a gas attack air raid precautions instructions advised how to put on a gas mask (ARPD 90-92),i) Hold the breath. ii) Remove headgear and place between the knees. iii) Lift the flap of the haversack [ …] iv) Bring the face-piece towards the face’[…](v) Breathe out and continue to breathe in a normal manner The rational technologies of drill, dressage and operational research enabled poise in the face of an eventual air-raid. Through this ‘logistical-life’ (Reid 17), thought was directed towards simple tasks by minutely described instructions. Stilled LifeThe end of stillness was usually marked by a reactionary ‘flinch’, ‘start’ or ‘jump’. Such reactionary ‘urgent analogs’ (Ngai 94; Tomkins 96) often occurred as a response to sounds and movements that merely broke the tension rather than accurately mimicking an air raid. These atmospheres were brittle and easily disrupted. Cars back-firing and changing gear were often complained about (MO 371), just as bringing people out of the quiescence of sleep was a common effect of air-raids (Kraftl and Horton 509). Disorientation was usually fostered in this process while people found it very difficult to carry out the most simple of tasks. Putting one’s clothes on or even making their way out of the bedroom door became enormously problematic. Sirens awoke a ‘conditioned reflex’ to take cover (MO 364). Long periods of sleep deprivation brought on considerable fatigue and anxiety. ‘Sleep we Must’ wrote journalist Ritchie Calder (252) noticing the invigorating powers of sleep for both urban morale and the bare existence of survival. For other more traumatized members of the population, psychological studies found that the sustained concentration of shelling caused what was named ‘apathy-retreat’ (Harrisson, Living 65). This extreme form of acquiescence saw especially susceptible and vulnerable civilians suffer an overwhelming urge to sleep and to be cared-for ‘as if chronically ill’ (Janis 90). A class and racial politics of quiescent affect was enacted as several members of the population were believed far more liable to ‘give way’ to defeat and dangerous emotions (Brittain 77; Committee of Imperial Defence).In other cases it was only once an air-raid had started that sleep could be found (MO 253). The boredom of waiting could gather in its intensity deforming bodies with “the doom of depression” (Anderson 749). The stopped time-spaces in advance of a raid could be soaked with so much tension that the commencement of sirens, vibrations and explosions would allow a person overwhelming relief (MO 253). Quoting from a boy recalling his experiences in Hannover during 1943, Hewitt illustrates:I lie in bed. I am afraid. I strain my ears to hear something but still all is quiet. I hardly dare breathe, as if something horrible is knocking at the door, at the windows. Is it the beating of my heart? ... Suddenly there seems relief, the sirens howl into the night ... (Heimatbund Niedersachsen 1953: 185). (Cited in Hewitt, When 16)Once a state of still was lost getting it back required some effort (Bissell, Comfortable 1697). Cautious of preventing mass panic and public hysteria by allowing the body to erupt outwards into dangerous vectors of mobility, the British government’s schooling in the theories of panicology (Orr 12) and contagious affect (Le Bon 17; Tarde 278; Thrift, Intensities 57; Trotter 140), made air raid precautions (ARP) officers, police and civil defence teams enforce ‘stay put’ and ‘hold firm’ orders to protect the population (Jones et al, Civilian Morale 463, Public Panic 63-64; Thomas 16). Such orders were meant to shield against precisely the kinds of volatile bodies they were trying to compel with their own bombing strategies. Reactions to the Blitz were moralised and racialised. Becoming stilled required self-conscious work by a public anxious not to be seen to ‘panic’. This took the form of self-disciplination. People exhausted considerable energy to ‘settle’ themselves down. It required ‘holding’ themselves still and ‘together’ in order to accomplish this state, and to avoid going the same way as the buildings falling apart around them, as some people observed (MO 408). In Britain a cup of tea was often made as a spontaneous response in the event of the conclusion of a raid (Brown 686). As well as destroying bombing created spaces too – making space for stillness (Conradson 33). Many people found that they could recall their experiences in vivid detail, allocating a significant proportion of their memories to the recollection of the self and an awareness of their surroundings (IWM 19103). In this mode of stillness, contemplation did not turn-inwards but unfolded out towards the environment. The material processual movement of the shell-blast literally evacuated all sound and materials from its centre to leave a vacuum of negative pressure. Diaries and oral testimonies stretch out these millisecond events into discernable times and spaces of sensation, thought and the experience of experience (Massumi, Parables 2). Extraordinarily, survivors mention serene feelings of quiet within the eye of the blast (see Mortimer 239); they had, literally, ‘no time to be frightened’ (Crighton-Miller 6150). A shell explosion could create such intensities of stillness that a sudden and distinctive lessening of the person and world are expressed, constituting ‘stilling-slowing diminishments’ (Anderson 744). As if the blast-vacuum had sucked all the animation from their agency, recollections convey passivity and, paradoxically, a much more heightened and contemplative sense of the moment (Bourke 121; Thrift, Still 41). More lucid accounts describe a multitude of thoughts and an attention to minute detail. Alternatively, the enormous peaking of a waking blast subdued all later activities to relative obsolescence. The hurricane of sounds and air appear to overload into the flatness of an extended and calmed instantaneous present.Then the whistling stopped, then a terrific thump as it hit the ground, and everything seem to expand, then contract with deliberation and stillness seemed to be all around. (As recollected by Bill and Vi Reagan in Gaskin 17)On the other hand, as Schivelbusch (7) shows us in his exploration of defeat, the cessation of war could be met with an outburst of feeling. In these micro-moments a close encounter with death was often experienced with elation, a feeling of peace and well-being drawn through a much more heightened sense of the now (MO 253). These are not pre-formed or contemplative techniques of attunement as Thrift has tracked, but are the consequence of significant trauma and the primal reaction to extreme danger.TracesSusan Griffin’s haunting A Chorus of Stones documents what she describes as a private life of war (1). For Griffin, and as shown in these brief examples, stillness and being-stilled describe a series of diverse experiences endured during aerial bombing. Yet, as Griffin narrates, these are not-so private lives. A common representation of air war can be found in Henry Moore’s tube shelter sketches which convey sleeping tube-dwellers harboured in the London underground during the Blitz. The bodies are represented as much more than individuals being connected by Moore’s wave-like shapes into the turbulent aggregation of a choppy ocean. What we see in Moore’s portrayal and the examples discussed already are experiences with definite relations to both inner and outer worlds. They refer to more-than individuals who bear intimate relations to their outsides and the atmospheric and material environments enveloping and searing through them. Stillness was an unlikely state composed through these circulations just as it was formed as a means of address. It was required in order to apprehend sounds and possible events through techniques of listening or waiting. Alternatively being stilled could refer to pauses between air-strikes and the corresponding breaks of tension in the aftermath of a raid. Stillness was composed through a series of distributed yet interconnecting bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres oriented towards the future and the past. The ruins of bombed-out building forms stand as traces even today. Just as Massumi (Sensing 16) describes in the context of architecture, the now static remainder of the explosion “envelops in its stillness a deformational field of which it stands as the trace”. The ruined forms left after the attack stand as a “monument” of the passing of the raid to be what it once was – house, factory, shop, restaurant, library - and to become something else. The experience of those ‘from below’ (Hewitt 2) suffering contemporary forms of air-warfare share many parallels with those of the Blitz. Air power continues to target, apparently more precisely, the affective tones of the body. Accessed by kinetic and non-kinetic forces, the signs of air-war are generated by the shelling of Kosovo, ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, air-strikes in Afghanistan and by the simulated air-raids of IDF aircraft producing sonic-booms over sleeping Palestinian civilians, now becoming far more real as I write in the final days of 2008. Achieving stillness in the wake of aerial trauma remains, even now, a way to survive the (private) life of air war. AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the editors and particularly the referees for such a close reading of the article; time did not permit the attention their suggestions demanded. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the AHRC whose funding allowed me to research and write this paper. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Geographies: Mobilities, Bodies and Subjects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (forthcoming). 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L’objectif de la thèse est de réaliser un système de convoyage flexible permettant de déplacer des micro-objets. Ce système pourra être amené à être intégré dans une micro-usine ce qui nécessite une forte reconfigurabilité et une faible consommation d’énergie. Ces deux critères ont donc été considérés lors de la conception du système de convoyage. Ce dernier est basé sur un actionneur planaire électromagnétique, développé au sein du laboratoire Roberval, et sur une surface intelligente composée de 5 × 5 cellules élémentaires permettant chacune de déplacer la partie mobile dans les deux directions du plan et des rotations autour de l'axe perpendiculaire au plan. Un modèle analytique de l’actionneur a été développé afin de calculer les efforts électromagnétiques ainsi que le déplacement de la partie mobile. Ce modèle a été utilisé lors de la phase de conception du système de convoyage. Un prototype expérimental a ensuite été fabriqué et testé ce qui a permis de valider le principe de fonctionnement proposé. Des tests expérimentaux ont montré la possibilité de réaliser des déplacements de grande étendue dans les deux directions du plan. De multiples tests expérimentaux (pilotage en boucle ouverte, caractérisation des performances telles que rectitude de déplacement, répétabilité de positionnement, charge déplaçable, …) a été réalisée afin de qualifier les performances du système de convoyage. Les points sur la réalisation : - Une modélisation statique sous RADIA a été développée afin de concevoir la surface intelligente notamment la zone de transition entre deux cellules voisines. Une modélisation dynamique réalisée sous MATLAB a permis de simuler le comportement d’un moteur en boucle ouverte et en boucle fermée. - Un prototype de surface intelligente, composé d’un circuit imprimé multicouches (4 couches) de dimensions 130 mm x 130 mm, a été conçu sous EAGLE software. L’influence de la distance entre les deux premières couches a été étudiée à l’aide des modèles développés afin d'assurer un déplacement uniforme dans les deux directions. - Un test expérimental avec LABVIEW interface d'une cellule élémentaire de la surface intelligente avec une partie mobile composée de deux moteurs magnétiques orthogonaux a été réalisé et a permis de valider le fonctionnement du système de convoyage dans les deux directions du plan. - Une autre série de tests avec LABVIEW interface a été réalisée afin de valider expérimentalement le déplacement de la partie mobile avec la surface intelligente au niveau des zones de transition entre les cellules élémentaires. Ces tests expérimentaux ont montré des déplacements de grande étendue dans les deux directions du plan et de rotation autour de l'axe perpendiculaire au plan. Des déplacements de grande étendue et des rotations de la partie mobile ont été mesurés à l’aide d’une méthode de traitement d'image réalisée sous MATLAB. - Parallèlement, on a étudié un capteur à déplacement optique à haute résolution qui peut être intégré dans le convoyeur. Un algorithme robuste pour le traitement du signal de capteur à fibres optiques à haute résolution pour mesurer de déplacement est développé. Dans cet algorithme, la position optimale de la partie mobile est déterminée pour obtenir un basculement sans arrêt entre les sondes et l'algorithme est implémenté sous MATLAB et validée par la mise en œuvre des signaux expérimentaux. Ces travaux de thèse ont été publiés dans une revue internationale (Computers in Industry (COMIND)) et présentés dans des congrès internationaux (IEEE Sensors, REM Mechatronics, AIM, IWMF) pendant les années 2011 à 2016
The aim of the thesis is to provide a flexible conveyor system for moving micro-objects. The system may need to be integrated into a micro-factory which requires high reconfigurability and low power consumption. These two criteria have been considered in the design of the conveyor system. The conveyor is based on a planar electromagnetic actuator developed in the Laboratoire Roberval of the UTC, and on smart surface composed of 5 x 5 unit cells; each ceii moves th movable part in the two directions of the plane. An analytical model of the actuator has been developed in order to calculate the electromagnetic forces and the displacement of the mobile part. This modei has been used during the design phase of the conveying system. An experimental prototype is then manufactured and tested which has validated the proposed principle of operation. Experimental tests have shown the ability to perform wide area displacement in both directions of the plane. Numerous experimental tests (control in open loop and closed loop performance characterization as straightness of movement, position repeatability, coupled- decoupled analysis...) have been done to qualify the performance of the conveyor system. Experiments for rotations about the axis perpendicular to the olane have also been performed successfully. Work synthesis: - Static modeling under RADIA was developed in order to design the conveyor surface especially for the transitio zone between two neighboring cells. A dynamic modeling under MATLAB allowed to simulate the behavior of single axis motor in open loop and closed loop control. - A conveyor surface prototype, consisting of a multilayer printed circuit board (4 layers) of dimensions 130 mm x 130 mm, was designed under EAGLE software. The influence of the distance between the first two layers was studied using the developed models to ensure uniform displacement in both the directions. - The experimental tests (with LABVIEW interface) of an elementary cell of the intelligent surface with a moving part composed of two orthogonal magnetic motors has been carried out that allowed to validate the operation of the conveying system in both directions of the plane. - Another series of tests with LABVIEW interface were carried out in order to validate experimentally the displacement of the mobile part with the smart surface at the transition zones between the elementary cells. - These experimental tests showed displacements of great extent in the two directions of the plane and of rotation about the axis perpendicular to the plane. - Long displacements and rotations of the moving part were measured using image processing algorithm developed in MATLAB. - At the same time, a high resolution fiber optic displacement sensor was studied that can be integrated into the conveyor surface locally for the precise positioning. A robust signal processing algorithm for high resolution displacement measurement was developed. In this algorithm, - The optimum position of the movable part is determined in order to obtain a continuous switching betwee the two fiber optic probes ; - The usable parts of the signals obtained from two probes were then filtered to measure the displacement using interpolation method ; The algorithm is implemented under MATLAB and validated by the implementation of the experimental signals. The work have been published in an international journal (Computers in Industry (COMIND)) and presented at international congresses (IEEE Sensors, REM Mechatronics, AIM, IWMF) during the years 2011 to 2016