An Experimental Evaluation of Smart Damping Materials for Reducing Structural Noise and Vibrations

Abstract

An experimental evaluation of the benefits of smart damping materials in reducing structural noise and vibration is presented. The construction of a special test rig for measuring both vibrations and structure-borne noise is discussed. Next, the application of smart damping materials, specifically piezoceramics with electrical shunts, in reducing the vibrations of a test plate is discussed. It is shown that the smart damping materials are able to effectively reduce the vibration peaks at multiple frequencies, with minimal amount of added weight to the structure, as compared to passive viscoelastic damping materials. Further, the test results show that the structure-borne noise at the vibration peaks is substantially reduced with the smart damping materials. The results indicate the viability of smart damping materials for many industrial applications where reducing noise and vibrations is desired, with minimal amounts of added weight.

Simultaneous Active Damping and Health Monitoring of Aircraft Panels

“…Digital movies of the experiments described here are available at http://www.cimss.vt.edu. A comparison between piezoceramic damping (both passive and active) on this same test panel and viscoelastic-based constrained layer damping can be found in Ahmadian et al (2001).…”

“…Although motivated by aircraft panels, the experimental demonstration reported here was performed in a standard laboratory test stand, allowing a variety of different panels with a variety of treatments to be tested and compared (Ahmadian, et al, 2001). The test stand was designed and fabricated for testing and evaluating the effectiveness of damping materials for reducing vibration and structure-borne noise and is common in the automobile industry (called a Toyota Test Stand).…”

“…The PZT patch used for both the control actuation and to drive the impedance signal for structural health monitoring is a single patch located at the center of the plate. The center is chosen for the location because it covers the antinodes of the lower frequencies as determined by scanning laser vibrometer measurements (Ahmadian, et al, 2001). This is also known from plate theory, but in applications to more complex structures the scanning laser measurements insure the proper location of sensors and actuators.…”

Evaluation of uncertainty effects to band gap behavior of circuitry-integrated piezoelectric metamaterial using order-reduced analysis

“…Owing to the two-way electro-mechanical coupling, piezoelectric transducers have been widely used in sensing, control, energy harvesting, and so on (Ahmadian et al, 2001; Aladwani et al, 2015; Wang and Tang, 2009). It has been recognized that incorporating piezoelectric transducer circuitry to host media can yield metamaterials.…”

Active Damping of a Piezoelectric Mems Acoustic Sensor

“…Piezoelectric element based active damping control has been studied and used in active noise suppression, aeronautic intelligence structures and so on [1,2]. Normally, the vibration sensor and feedback control actuator should be designed individually.…”