Optimal Design and Control of a Rotating Flexible Arm With ACLD Treatment

In this paper, the optimal design and control of a rotating clamped-free flexible arm with fully covered active constrained layer damping (ACLD) treatment are studied. The arm is rotating in a horizontal plane in which the gravitational effect and rotary inertia are neglected. The piezo-sensor voltage is fed back to the piezo-actuator via a PD controller. Finite element method (FEM) in conjunction with Hamilton’s principle is used to derive the governing equations of motion of the system which takes into account the effects of centrifugal stiffening due to the rotation of the beam. The damping behavior of the viscoelastic material (VEM) is modeled using the complex shear modulus method. The design optimization objective is to maximize the sum of the first three open-loop modal damping ratios divided by the weight of the damping treatment. A genetic algorithm, differential evolution (DE), combined with a gradient-based algorithm, sequential quadratic programming (SQP), is used to determine the optimal design variables such as the thickness and storage shear modulus of the VEM core. Next for the determined optimal design variables, the optimal control problem is performed to determine the optimal control gains which minimize a quadratic performance index. The control performance index is normalized with respect to the initial conditions and the optimal control problem is posed to solve a min-max optimization problem. The results of this study will be useful in the optimal design and control of adaptive and smart rotating structures such as rotorcraft blades or robotic arms.