Experimental and analytical study of active control of energy transmission through double walls using novel piezoelectric actuators

Abstract

Active noise control has recently been used to increase the sound transmission loss of double wall structures. Vibration energy transmission through a double-plates system is investigated experimentally and analytically in this paper. Novel high performance actuators which use two curved THUNDER actuators as active driving components are developed and mounted between the two plates to control the energy transmission in the double-plates system. The Rayleigh–Ritz method and eigenfunction expansion theorem are used to resolve arbitrary boundary conditions of plates, and the feedforward control strategy is employed in this paper. The time average power transmission between the source, actuators and receiver plate are discussed and utilized as a cost function to obtain optimal control. The optimal control voltages for actuators are obtained by minimizing the cost function. A double-plates system connected by four actuators is set up experimentally in order to verify the models and formulations by comparing with analytical results. The analytical and experimental data show that the new actuator exhibits excellent performance on active control of power transmission.