Active vibration control of spatial flexible multibody systems

Abstract

In this work a flexible multibody dynamics formulation of complex models in- cluding elastic components made of composite materials is extended to include piezoelectric sensors and actuators. The only limitation for the deformation of a structural member is that they must remain elastic and linear when described in a coordinate frame fixed to a mate- rial point or region of its domain. The flexible finite-element model of each flexible body is obtained referring the flexible body nodal coordinates to the body fixed frame and using a diagonalized mass description of the inertia in the mass matrix and on the gyroscopic force vector. The modal superposition technique is used to reduce the number of generalized coor- dinates to a reasonable dimension for complex shaped structural models of flexible bodies. The active vibration control of the flexible multibody components is implemented using an asymmetric collocated piezoelectric sensor/actuator pair. An electromechanically coupled model is taken into account to properly consider the surface-bonded piezoelectric transduc- ers and their effects on the time and spatial response of the flexible multibody components.