Online control of a thin film deposition system under uncertainty (Rasoulian & Ricardez-Sandoval, J. Process Control, 2015)
Figure a) below shows a schematic of a typical physical vapour deposition system modelled using a multiscale approach. Figure b) shows the PDFs of the actual multiscale system under uncertainty in the model parameters and their corresponding probability distributions using power series expansions (PSE). These representative approximations enabled the development of robust estimators that were used in this work to perform online control of this process under uncertainty (figure c). The results obtained from this implementation show that the proposed robust control scheme can meet the process goals in the presence of uncertainty in the multiscale model parameters (figure d).
First-principles-based Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) model for carbon nanotube growth (Li et al., J. Catalysis, 2015)
A comprehensive model that describes the growth of carbon nanotubes in nickel nanoparticles was developed in our group using DFT analysis to compute the energetics and KMC simulations. The system under analysis shown in panel a involves carbon nucleation and growth reactions that have never been considered before for this process. The proposed model was validated using experimental data and has shown to capture the key dynamics for this system (figure b). Therefore, the developed model has been used to provide insight on the early stages of the carbon nanotube formation in this system.