Structural Vibration Control via R-L Shunted Active Fiber Composites

Abstract

This article presents a successful extension of passive R-L shunt damping to piezoelectric ceramic elements working in direct 3-3 mode and a performance comparison to elements working in indirect 3-1 mode. A new circuit topology is implemented to synthesize the very large inductances required by the low inherent piezoelectric device capacitance at relatively low frequencies. This allows for efficient tuning of the R-L circuit to the structure resonance frequency to be damped. The vibration suppression performance of monolithic piezoelectric ceramic actuators and active fiber composites is compared in this study. For this purpose, different actuators are bonded on aluminum cantilever plates. An integrated FE model is implemented for the prediction of structure resonance frequencies, optimum values for electric components, and the resulting vibration suppression performance. The passive structure, bonded active patch, and shunted electrical network are analyzed within the same FE model. Active fiber composite patches working in the direct 3-3 mode show equivalent specific damping performance compared to conventional monolithic 3-1 actuated patches. Issues related to the sensitivity of R-L shunts to variations in environmental and operational conditions are discussed in this study. In short, monolithic actuators operating on the 3-1 piezoelectric effect seem to be the best for use in R-L shunting.

Balanced calibration of resonant piezoelectric RL shunts with quasi-static background flexibility correction

“…It is noted that the coefficient κ r represents the square of the generalized coupling coefficient with respect to the mode r. This parameter is commonly estimated -without background flexibility correction -via the relative difference between the square of the open and short circuit natural frequencies, see for example [7,20,37].…”

Coupling of experimentally validated electroelastic dynamics and mixing rules formulation for macro-fiber composite piezoelectric structures

“…The resulting active-fiber composite (AFC) structure was first characterized by Bent et al (Bent, 1997;Bent et al, 1995), and its properties were further investigated by others (Belloli et al, 2007;Berger et al, 2005;Brei and Cannon, 2004;Sodano, 2008, 2009) numerically and experimentally in next-generation efforts. However, the AFC technology employed piezoelectric fibers with circular cross section that limited the interactions between fibers and electrodes, yielding low electromechanical coupling and high dielectric loss.…”

Finite element reduced order model for noise and vibration reduction of double sandwich panels using shunted piezoelectric patches

“…The piezoelectric patches transform mechanical energy of the vibrating structure into electrical energy, which is then dissipated by Joule heat in the shunt circuits. Several shunt circuits can be considered: the classical R-and RL-shunts, proposed by Hagood and von Flotow [15] and improvements of those techniques, by the use of several piezoelectric elements [16][17][18], active fiber composites [19] or adaptive shunts [20], and recently semi-passive techniques, commonly known as switch techniques [21][22][23]. As those techniques are passive (or semi-passive if some electronic components have to be powered), a critical issue is that their performances, in terms of damping efficiency, directly depend on the electromechanical coupling between the host structure and the piezoelectric elements, which has to be maximized and necessitates the development of predictive models.…”