Self-Powered Active Control for an Aeroelastic Plate-Like Wing Using Piezoelectric Material

This paper presents the self-powered active control of elastic and aeroelastic oscillations. A plate-like wing with two piezoelectric layers on the bottom surface and one piezoelectric layer on the top surface is modeled along with an electrical circuit. The direct piezoelectric effect of the bottom layer is used for mechanical to electrical energy conversion. The electrical circuit calculates the control voltage to be applied into the top piezoelectric layer that works as an actuator. The required actuation energy is fully supplied by the harvested energy. The control voltage is obtained from a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) control law. Three cases are investigated. In the first one the harmonic base excitation of the cantilevered wing is considered, the suppression of flutter oscillations is investigated in the second case and the atmospheric turbulence induced vibrations problem is presented in the third case. The performance of the self-powered controller is similar to the performance of a conventional active controller with limited control voltage.