Low-energy-consumption hybrid vibration suppression based on an energy-recycling approach

An innovative method of hybrid vibration suppression using piezoelectric materials is proposed. It combines bang-bang active vibration suppression and energy-recycling semiactive vibration suppression. The piezoelectric materials are electromechanically coupled and convert mechanical energy into electrical energy and vice versa.,With this method, a part of the electrical energy needed for suppressing vibration is obtained from the mechanical energy of the vibrating structures and is efficiently recycled. Furthermore, the actively supplied energy is stored in the transducers and is reused many times for vibration suppression. Therefore, the hybrid method has better performance than the case where the bang-bang active method and the energy-recycling semiactive method are both used, but independently. The hybrid method saves the actively supplied energy and is thus a low-energy consumption vibration control. Its effectiveness in suppressing vibrations was proven in numerical simulations and experiments using a 10-bay truss structure. Moreover, a novel method to prevent undesired control chattering is proposed to further save energy supplied from the external source.