Active control of plate vibration using piezoelectric patch

Abstract

Developing light weight, stronger and flexible plate panels for engineering structure such as aircraft to withstand excessive vibration has been the interest of many researchers. Piezoelectric material has been a popular choice to attenuate the plate vibration actively and numerous techniques of optimal control and actuator placement has been proposed. This research discusses active vibration control on a simply supported thin plate using piezoelectric patches. Piezoelectric patches are used as exciters and actuators. The vibration control is focussed on frequency range with modal overlap factor equal and less than one, where the peaks of the frequency response function are differentiable to each other. Analytical derivation of a benchmark model consist of a simply supported thin plate with piezoelectric patches is obtained using Euler-Bernoulli model and Lagrangian energy method. MATLAB programme is written to compute the system energy, with and without controller, due to point force excitation and excitation from a piezoelectric patch. The optimal location of the collocated sensor-actuator and the optimal PID controller gains are obtained using a swarm intelligent algorithm called Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The result is then compared with Genetic Algorithm (GA) and verified with enumerative method. Virtual experiment is performed using MATLAB-COMSOL Multiphysics integration to verify the optimal location of collocated sensor-actuator and controller gains. Finally, physical experiment is conducted to validate the findings.