Decentralized Vibration Control in a Launch Vehicle Payload Fairing

Abstract

The vibro-acoustic environment inside a launch vehicle payload fairing is extremely violent resulting in excessive development costs for satellites and other payloads. The development of smart structures and active noise and vibration control technologies promised to revolutionize the design, construction and, most importantly, the acoustic environment within these fairings. However, the early promise of these technologies has not been realized in such large-scale systems primarily because of the excessive complexity, cost and weight associated with centralized control systems. Now, recent developments in MEMS sensors and actuators, along with networked embedded processor technology, have opened new research avenues in decentralized controls based on networked embedded systems. This work describes the development and comparison of decentralized control systems that utilize this new control paradigm. The controllers are hosted on numerous nodes, possessing limited computational capability, sensors and actuators. Each of these nodes is also capable of communicating with other nodes via a wired or wireless network. The constraints associated with networked embedded systems control that the control systems be relatively simple computationally, scalable and robust to failures. Simulations were conducted that demonstrate the ability of such a control architecture to attenuate specific structural modes.