A new global approach for improved vibration damping of smart structure, based on global energy redistribution by means of a network of piezoelectric elements is proposed. It is basically using semi-active Synchronized Switch Damping technique. SSD technique relies on a cumulative build-up of the voltage resulting from the continuous switching and it was shown that the performance is strongly related to this voltage. The increase of the piezoelectric voltage results in improvement of the damping performance. External voltage sources or improved switching sequences were previously designed to increase this voltage in the case of single piezoelectric element structure configurations. This paper deals with extended structure with many embedded piezoelectric elements. The proposed strategy consist of using an electric network made with non-linear component and switches in order to set up and control a low-loss energy transfer from source piezoelements extracting the vibration energy of the structure and oriented toward a given piezoelement in order to increase its operative energy for improving a given mode damping. This paper presents simulation of a clamped plate with four piezoelectric elements implemented in the Matlab/Simulink^TM environment and Simscape^TM library. The various simulation cases show the relationship between the damping performance on a given targeted mode and the established power flow. SSDD and SSDT are two proposed original networks. Performances are compared to the SSDI baseline. A damping increase of 18dB can be obtained even with a weakly coupled piezoelectric element in the multi-sine excitation case. This result proves the importance of new global non-linear multi-actuator strategies for improved vibration damping of extended smart structure.

Date Published: 10 April 2013
PDF: 15 pages
Proc. SPIE 8688, Active and Passive Smart Structures and Integrated Systems 2013, 86880V (10 April 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2008151

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8688:
Active and Passive Smart Structures and Integrated Systems 2013
Henry Sodano, Editor(s)