Distributed control of beam by electric transmission lines with PZT actuators.

Francesco Dell'Isola (1, 2) , Stefano Vidoli (1)

1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria Strutturale e Geotecnica
2 Laboratorio Strutture e Materiali Intelligenti - Fondazione Tullio Levi-Civita

The aim of the paper is to propose a distributed control technique based on the modal coupling between a beam and an electric transmission line with PZT actuators; these last behave as capacitances in the electric line and contribute to beam stiffness because their end-points are restrained along the beam; we call the described system a piezoelectro-mechanical (PEM) beam. Structural control by means of concentrated devices often requires high voltages and high inductances; this fact is particularly serious when one has to deal with PZT actuators; in order to overcome the problem we propose a device in which the control action is distributed along the beam. We found that the line inductance and the line resistance behave as electric "taps" respectively for the electromechanical modal coupling and for the damping efficiency: we found a bounded region in the line impedance plane is which the energy exchanged between the beam and the electric line is maximum and therefore the control strength is maximum. By means of already available PZT actuators we obtain very high damping ratios for mechanical vibrations (δ ~ 0.1). We only investigated a simple case of passive control in damping vibration, but several active control applications are conceivable: it seem to us that such control technique is more efficient than those already proposed in the literature characterized by the use of actuators supplying concentrated forces.

Domains: Mechanics [physics.med-ph]

Francesco Dell'Isola, Stefano Vidoli. Distributed control of beam by electric transmission lines with PZT actuators.. 2010. ⟨hal-00512773⟩