Optimal placement of piezoelectric curve beams in structural shape control

Abstract

Shape control of flexible structures using piezoelectric materials has attracted much attention due to its wide applications in controllable systems such as space and aeronautical engineering. The major work in the field is to find a best control voltage or an optimal placement of the piezoelectric actuators in order to actuate the structure shape as close as possible to the desired one. The current research focus on the investigation of static shape control of intelligent shells using spatially distributed piezoelectric curve beam actuators. The finite element formulation of the piezoelectric model is briefly described. The piezoelectric curve beam element is then integrated into a collocated host shell element by using nodal displacement constraint equations. The linear least square method (LLSM) is employed to get the optimum voltage distributions in the control system so that the desired structure shape can be well matched. Furthermore, to find the optimal placement of the piezoelectric curve beam actuators, a genetic algorithm (GA) is introduced in the computation model as well as the consideration of the different objective functions. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the validity of the theoretical model and numerical algorithm developed.