Active vibration confinement of flexible structures using piezoceramic patch actuators

A new full state feedback control strategy is proposed to confine the vibratory motion of flexible structures. The purpose of active vibration confinement is to prohibit structural vibration initiated at some part of a structure from being transferred into a vibration sensitive portion of the structure. It allows more effective vibration suppression especially when control authority is limited. The distributed system is discretized using the finite element method and the control force is calculated such that the closed-loop mode shapes have reduced amplitudes in the concerned area. The derived control algorithm is based on the assumption that all the state variables are known in real time. To obtain this information, a full-state observer, using small segments of piezoelectric film as sensors, is utilized. The proposed approach is demonstrated by an experiment where two PZT patch actuators confine the vibration of a pinned-pinned beam using two PVDF patches as sensors. Both simulation and experiment results verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.