Plate vibration modes identification by using piezoelectric sensors

In this paper, the authors present vibration mode identification of rectangular plates by using discrete piezoelectric materials. The novelty in this study stems from the fact that only spatial information is used. The analytical development and numerical simulation results of the method are also included. For the structural vibration control community, identification of the dominant vibration has been an important issue. If the dominant vibration modes are successfully identified, the control engineers can choose a proper control gain set which has been pre-tuned for the identified vibration mode. As the development of piezoelectric materials progressed, vibration mode identification techniques step into a new stage. Several papers reported vibration mode identification by using distributed piezoelectric modal sensors. Unfortunately, the spatially filtering methods need specially designed configuration corresponding to the geometry of the structures. These difficulties hinder the application and development of modal sensing and vibration control technology. In this paper, the authors develop a new method of the mode identification, and present analytical simulations for rectangular plates and circular plates. Finally, experimental verification of the method is also presented.