Adaptive Piezoelectric Vibration Control With Synchronized Switching

An autonomous vibration controller that adapts to variations in a system’s mass, stiffness, and excitation, and maximizes dissipation through synchronized switching, is described. In the model and laboratory measurements, a cantilever beam is driven through base excitation and two piezoelectric elements are attached to the beam for vibration control purposes. The distributed-parameter model for the beam-element system is discretized by using Galerkin’s method, and time histories of the system’s response describe the controller’s attenuation characteristics. The system is piecewise linear, and a state-to-state modal analysis method is developed to simulate the coupled dynamics of the beam and piezoelectric circuit by mapping the generalized coordinates between the sets of modes for the open-switch and closed-switch configurations. In synchronized switching control, the elements are periodically switched to an external resonant shunt, and the instants of optimal switching are identified through a filtered velocity signal. The controller adaptively aligns the center frequency of a bandpass filter to the beam’s fundamental frequency through a fuzzy logic algorithm in order to maximize attenuation even with minimal a priori knowledge of the excitation or the system’s mass and stiffness parameters. In implementation, the controller is compact owing to its low inductance and computational requirement. The adaptive controller attenuates vibration over a range of excitation frequencies, is robust to variations in system parameters, and can outperform traditional synchronized switching.