Comparison of vibration control by confinement to conventional active vibration control methods

Abstract

The primary objective of this work is to determine to what extent vibration confinement can be used to enhance conventional active vibration control methods. By using a fixed-pinned beam with an attached elastic component, this objective was accomplished by applying active control to suppress vibrations in the component while the beam is under confined and unconfined conditions. Confinement was achieved by passively tuning linear and torsional stiffnesses of an elastic intermediate support, which alter the system's mode shapes. Four different active control methods were studied, including optimal control, adaptive feedforward cancellation, direct velocity feedback, and active isolation. The results show that passive confinement can significantly improve the performance of all four vibration control methods while simultaneously reducing their power requirements.