Design and Test of a Piezoelectric Inertial Mass Actuator for Active Vibration Control

Abstract

Active control of vibrations can outperform passive systems in certain applications, e.g. when broadband damping is requested or when several orders of a periodic disturbance have to be cancelled. To generate dynamic forces for the active control system, inertial mass actuators are frequently used. Mainly, they comprise a force generating element driving a single-degree-of-freedom oscillator which is coupled to the structure to be controlled. Thus, those actuators can also be used for retrofitting of existing structures or for prototyping purposes. In this paper, a design for an inertial mass actuator utilizing piezoceramic actuators is studied. Since those actuators integrate both stiffness and force generation into one element, this enables more compact and mechanically robust designs. With respect to the future integration into industrial applications, standard multilayer piezoelectric actuators are considered to decrease the costs of the system and allow for a high reliability. Usually, an inertial mass actuator should possess a low resonance frequency in order to enable operation over a broad frequency range. Since the stiffness of piezoelectric multilayer actuators is rather high, a lever mechanism is designed which transforms the stiffness of the piezoelectric element into the desired range. An analytical model of the inertial mass actuator is derived and parameter studies are performed to investigate the characteristics of the design. A prototype is set up and the main parameters like resonance and block force are experimentally validated. Finally, the integration of the actuator into an active vibration control system for a lightweight structure is described.

Adaptive Piezoelectric Absorber for Active Vibration Control

“…Tuning of the actuator by mechanical pre-loading is discussed in [8]. There numerical and experimental results show a good correlation.…”

“…The work presented in this paper deals with investigations on a dynamic inertial mass actuator that has been developed previously [8] and which can also be used as an adaptive tuned vibration absorber. In the following section, the basic concepts for the adaptation of the resonance frequency are summarized and compared.…”

“…The design of the adaptive absorber that will be investigated is introduced. Experiments on the performance of the different functions of the device are performed at a truss structure that was already used as an example for other laboratory experiments [8,9]. The structure can be considered a generic example of lightweight structures used in space applications or bridges.…”

Automatic design and synthesis of control for a plug and play active vibration control module

“…Many control strategies have been explored and applied for vibration control of lightweight flexible structures (Chopra, 2002; Goh and Caughey, 1985; Goh and Yan, 1996; Herold et al, 2014; Housner et al., 1997; Hrovat, 1997; Kuo and Morgan, 1999; Preumont et al., 1992), and in particularly for machine tools (Ganguli et al., 2007; Hosseinabadi and Altintas, 2014; Preumont, 2011). With the development of robust control, H∞-norm was found to be appropriate for specifying the plant uncertainty (Skogestad and Postlethwaite, 2005; Zames, 1981; Zhou et al., 1996).…”

Passive, Adaptive, Active Vibration Control, and Integrated Approaches

“…Alternatively, out-of-phase dynamic operation of the piezoelectric actuators generates bending movements of the beam, which causes transverse dynamic forces at the base of the absorber. More details on the design can be found in [29,30].…”