Experimental study of the performance of a Hinf-AVC system with limited hardware resources and different control strategies

Abstract

This article presents experimental studies on different active vibration control (AVC) sys-tems concepts for clamped flat plates using Hinf-feedback controller. For a comparative performance evaluation of different control strategies in terms of global vibration reduction and system complexity, a generic set-up is used. The placement of piezoelectric actuators and different types of sensors (accelerometer, piezoelectric patch sensors) is performed with regard to controllability and observability criteria. In addition to the common multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) model from all actuators to all sensors a so called generalized plant with extended number of performance outputs is used to design a Hinf-controller. The extended number of performance outputs is generated by offline laser scanning vibrome-ter (LSV) measurements using a fine grid of LSV scan points. To evaluate the different control performances in comparison to the system complexity the number of transducers is varied. To identify the key trends more than 100 centralized and decentralized control-lers are studied experimentally and the global vibration reduction is quantified using LSV measurements. For systems with a higher complexity, it can be shown that the use of an extended generalized plant can significantly improve global vibration attenuation. Further, it can be observed that mixed sensor configurations lead to an improved broadband per-formance. The final evaluation is based on criteria such as controller performance, stabil-ity, modularity and system complexity.