Multimodal passive vibration control of sandwich beams with shunted shear piezoelectricmaterials

Abstract

This work presents a performance analysis of multimodal passive vibration control of asandwich beam using shear piezoelectric materials, embedded in a sandwich beam core,connected to independent resistive shunt circuits. Shear piezoelectric actuators wererecently shown to be more interesting for higher frequencies and stiffer structures. Inparticular, for shunted damping, it was shown that equivalent material loss factors of up to31% can be achieved by optimizing the shunt circuit. In the present work, special attentionis given to the design of multimodal vibration control through independent shunted shearpiezoelectric sensors. In particular, a parametric analysis is performed to evaluateoptimal configurations for a set of modes to be damped. Then, a methodology toevaluate the modal damping resulting from each shunted piezoelectric sensoris presented using the modal strain energy method. Results show that modaldamping factors of 1%–2% can be obtained for three selected vibration modes.