Lea Beilkin-Sirota
Lea was born in Moscow and moved to Israel at the age of five. As a part of the Atuda-Reamim program, she completed her BSc degree in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technion, for which she received the Safra prize for excellence. After few years she returned to the faculty for her direct track PhD studies in the field of Automatic Control, under the supervision of Prof. Yoram Halevi. For excellence in her graduate studies, Lea received the Benin prize as well as the Israel Science and Technology ministry fellowship. Lea was awarded the great opportunity to do a postdoc in MIT, where she is coming accompanied by her husband and baby girl.
In her PhD dissertation, Lea investigated the dynamic behavior and developed a new control methodology for a class of continuous flexible structures. The structures are employed in various advanced engineering applications, such as unmanned space or aerial vehicles, deep well drilling and medical instruments. Flexible means light weight. However, it may yield undesired vibrations even for slow tracking maneuvers or disturbance signals. The first step was deriving exact models, infinite dimensional and fractional order in the complex domain, which exhibit the traveling wave properties of the systems. The proposed controller is based on those models and stops the wave reflections from the structure boundaries. It then compensates for the remaining dynamic delay by extending the notion of the classical dead time compensation to the fractional order realm. The control algorithm therefore achieves active rigidization of the flexible systems without changing their physical properties. In addition to control, Lea derived the complete solution of a certain dissipative boundary value problem, which was so far considered as an open problem in vibration theory. In MIT, Lea will work with Dr. Annaswamy in the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory, Mechanical Engineering. The research will focus on control of Power Systems and Smart Grid.