Self-sensing actuation using online capacitance measurement with application to active vibration control

Abstract

Self-sensing actuation has been extensively used in vibration control of flexible structures over the last three decades. Positive position feedback controller has been commonly used in this field due to the robustness against spillover phenomena. Piezoelectric clamped capacitance is the most important parameter that affects the performance of this technique. In this study, the effect of capacitance change on performance and stability of a self-sensing system with positive position feedback controller is investigated. Based on this analysis, some modifications are suggested to increase the stability of the closed-loop system against capacitance change. An online Fourier transform–based capacitance measurement method is used, which guarantees good performance and stability of closed-loop system in the presence of capacitance change. Experimental results are also presented to show the effectiveness of this method in vibration control of cantilever beam.

Real time high voltage capacitance for rapid evaluation of dielectric elastomer actuators

“…The proposed method is also flexible since it only requires voltage connections to the sample devices. Thus the proposed method may potentially be further generalized to analyze other dielectric artificial muscles, such as piezoelectric actuators, 40 ionic polymer–metal composite (IPMC) actuators, 41 Hydraulically Amplified Self-healing Electrostatic (HASEL) actuators, 42 and liquid amplified zipping actuators (LAZA). 43 We envision this simple method becoming a standard measurement for DEAs across scales, materials, and fabrication methods.…”

Sensing and Self-Sensing Actuation Methods for Ionic Polymer–Metal Composite (IPMC): A Review

“…SSA methods for a wide scope of ionic electromechanically active polymers were reviewed in 2015 by Kruusamae et al [163]. Applications of SSA include active vibration control [165,173,174,175], structural health monitoring or healing [176,177,178], system parameter identification [179], control algorithm optimization [167,179] etc. IPMCs too can be used for simultaneous sensing and actuation [9,11,12,125,144,147,163], and the challenge resides in isolating the sensing signal from the effects of actuation.…”

Position and force self-sensing piezoelectric valve with hysteresis compensation

“…Therefore, bridge-type circuitry is not suitable for static or low frequency situation, but mainly used in active vibration control (Gou and Li, 2011;Hong and Pang, 2012;Xie, 2013), vibration suppression (Boettcher et al, 2012;Hu et al, 2017a;Liu et al, 2015), system identification (Faegh et al, 2013), and fault diagnosis (Hu et al, 2017b). Piezoelectric capacitor/dielectric is particularly used to represent the position recently (Asghari et al, 2015), with a small signal of several hundred kHz added on the low-frequency driving voltage as the measuring signal (Ikeda and Morita, 2011;Seethaler, 2012a, 2012b). The generation of high-frequency signals and the extraction of small-signal pose a challenge for real-time control.…”