Active Vibration Suppression in Flexible Structures
Flexible structures in aerospace, energy, and mechanical systems, such as wings, blades, panels, and beams, are highly susceptible to vibrations induced by aerodynamic loading, external disturbances, and structural nonlinearities. These vibrations degrade performance, accelerate material fatigue, and can trigger instabilities such as flutter. Despite decades of work, practical vibration suppression remains challenging due to modeling uncertainty, actuator/sensor placement constraints, spillover effects, and limited sensing. Classical vibration control approaches often rely on either high-fidelity physics-based models that are difficult to identify and control in practice, or fully model-free heuristics that yield good performance on a narrow range of environmental conditions and are not robust to changes in these conditions. The aim of this project is the development of a low-complexity, output-feedback vibration suppression controller that targets dominant vibration modes, does not require complex modeling, and adapts to environmental changes.
The main tasks performed in this project so far are the following:
- Developed a lumped parameter model of a cantilever beam system to test the effectiveness of vibration suppression control algorithms under external disturbances and tested the effectiveness of retrospective cost adaptive control (RCAC) at this task.
- Assisted in the implementation of a low-order H2/H-infinity controller to suppress the aeroelastic vibrations in a cantilever beam model under aerodynamic loading.
- Designed and constructed a cantilever beam experiment to test the effectiveness of vibration suppression control algorithms under external disturbances.
Papers
- Model-free adaptive output feedback vibration suppression in a cantilever beam (More details)
- Low-Order H2/H-infinity Controller Design for Aeroelastic Vibration Suppression (More details)
