Passive and Active Strategies for Vibration Control of Lightly Damped Structures

Lightweight designs in engineering applications give rise to flexible structures with extremely low internal damping. Vibrations of these flexible structures due to an unwanted excitation of system resonances may lead to high cycle fatigue failure and noise propagation. A common method to suppress the vibrations is to increase the damping of the system using one of the classical control techniques i.e. passive, active, and/or hybrid. Passive techniques are those control systems that are simply integrated into the structures with no need of external power source for their operations, like viscoelastic damping, piezoelectric and electromagnetic shunt damping, tuned mass damper, etc. However, the control performance of these systems, in terms of the damping ratio and the robustness to uncertainties, is highly limited to the system properties. For example, viscoelastic damping may not perform well at low frequencies and the performance of shunt damping is dependent on the electromechanical coupling between the structure and the transducer. To overcome the limitations associated with passive controls, it has been proposed to use active control systems, which are less sensitive to the system's parameters, to improve the control performance. It requires an integration of sensors and actuators with a feedback loop containing control laws. However, the high requirement of the external power source is not favorable for engineering applications where energy efficiency is the key parameter. The combination of active and passive strategies, known as hybrid control systems, can provide a fail-safe configuration with a high control performance and low power consumption. The price to pay for such configurations is the complexity of the design. This doctoral thesis first investigates the conceptual designs of all kinds of classical control systems for a simplified mechanical system. They include 1) the passive shunt using an electromagnetic transducer, 2) the active control system u
Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished