Vibration control via shunted embedded piezoelectric fibers

The scientific community has put significant efforts into the manufacturing of sensors and actuators made of piezoceramic fibers with interdigitated electrodes. These allow for increased conformability, integrability in laminate structures and offer high coupling factors. They are of particular interest for damping applications. This paper presents a comparison between piezoceramic monolithic actuators and Active Fiber Composites (AFCs) for shunt damping. For this purpose, the different actuators were bonded on aluminum cantilever plates, respectively embedded in a glass fiber composite cantilever plate. The vibration suppression was attained by converting the electric charge by means of the converse piezoelectric effect and dissipated through robust resonant shunt circuits. A new circuit topology was used, which enables efficient damping even with low piezoelectric capacitance. An integrated FE model was implemented for prediction of the natural frequencies, the optimum values for the electric components and the resulting damping performance. Patches working in the direct 3-3 mode show much better specific damping performance than the 3-1 actuated patch. The comparison between monolithic and AFC actuators shows that AFCs fulfill integrability and performance requirements for the planned damping applications.