Active vibration isolation by emulating the inerter through relative acceleration feedback

Abstract

This study focuses on the realisation of a small-scale inerter by relative acceleration feedback and its use to isolate vibration. Two accelerometers attached to the two mechanical terminals of an electrodynamic force actuator are used to obtain the relative acceleration signal. This signal is then amplified by a constant gain and fed back to the two electrical terminals of the electrodynamic actuator as a voltage command. This sensor-actuator system is coupled to a two Degree-Of-Freedom (DOF) mechanical oscillator to study the feedback loop’s stability and the maximum achievable inertance effect. A fully coupled simulation model including the dynamics of the two inertial accelerometers and the electrodynamic actuator is developed. It is shown that, because of the active control system emulating an inerter, an antiresonance appears in the transfer admittance function of the two DOF mechanical system. Therefore, significant vibration isolation effect can be achieved in the narrow frequency band around the antiresonance. The antiresonance frequency is easily tuned by adjusting the feedback gain. The synthetized inertance is a complex frequency dependent function, which is predominantly real-valued in the frequency range between 5 and 1600 Hz. It is shown that it does not depend on the mechanical system properties, but only on the properties of the transducers used and the signal conditioning in the feedback loop. As a result, this frequency range can be adjusted according to a particular application.