A numerical and experimental study of optimal velocity feedback control for vibration suppression of a plate-like structure

Abstract

This study presents a numerical and an experimental study on an active vibration control system. The system includes a fully-clamped plate and two surface bonded piezoelectric actuators and a collocated velocity sensor at one of the actuator locations. One of the piezoelectric actuators is used for disturbance actuation and the other one is used for control actuation. A model based optimal velocity feedback controller is used as control algorithm. The disturbance and actuator models are obtained through experimental characterization of the plate under the effect of the disturbance source. A representative SIMULINK model is built in parallel to the development of the experimental setup in order to investigate performance of the controller for various control parameters. After the model based optimal controller is designed, performance of the optimal velocity feedback controller is validated with the experimental study by comparing the vibration suppression values at multiple modes of the structure. Results show that the developed control methodology effectively suppresses the vibration amplitudes at multiple modes of the structure and also vibration attenuation levels can be predicted accurately with the simulations for various controller design parameters. It is also demonstrated that using an optimal controller enhances the performance of the system as opposed to just using velocity feedback algorithm for the active vibration control of the smart plate.