Spatial H2 control of a piezoelectric laminate beam:: Experimental implementation

The aim of this paper is to design and experimentally evaluate the performance of a feedback controller to suppress vibration of a flexible beam. The controller is designed to minimize the spatial H-2 norm of the closed-loop system to ensure average reduction of vibration throughout the entire structure. Vibrations of the first six bending modes of the beam are to be controlled using a collocated piezoelectric actuator-sensor pair attached to the beam. Feedthrough terms are incorporated into the flexible-structure model to correct the locations of the in-bandwidth zeros. It is shown that the spatial H-2 control, has an advantage over the point-wise H-2 control in minimizing the vibration of the entire structure. The spatial H-2 controller minimizes the H-2 norm of the entire structure more uniformly, while the pointwise H-2 controller only has a local effect. The implemented spatial H-2 controller is able to minimize the first six bending modes of the beam effectively. This spatial H-2 control can also be applied to more general structural vibration suppression problems.