Design of Switching Damping Control for Smart Structure Self-Powered Adaptive Damping Control

This paper presents a new damping control circuit which named adaptive VSPD [1] (adaptive velocity-controlled switching piezoelectric damping) that can be used to vary control voltage of VSPD damping circuit with the amplitude variation and be self-powered itself as well. Since the voltage source in the VSPD damping control circuit may cause a stability problem at small vibrations, an adaptive voltage source can be designed to purposely solve this problem. The design concept of an adaptive VSPD unit is not only to dampen the residual vibration but also to maintain the system stability by incorporating an adaptive control voltage. In fact, the energy needed for the extra voltage source within the control circuit can be provided by the storage capacitor and the energy stored can be harvested from the structure vibration energy. With this design, the damping performance can be maximized while maintaining system stability at the same time and also does not add complexity to the circuit. All the theoretical modeling, simulation and experimental results will all be detailed in this paper.