COMPARISON OF STRUCTURAL–ACOUSTIC CONTROL DESIGNS ON AN ACTIVE COMPOSITE PANEL

This work presents a comparison of three technologies for structural–acoustic control that, while prevalent in the literature, had not been compared on a single structure. The comparison is generalizable because the techniques are implemented on a panel structure representative of a more complex structure (e.g., an aircraft fuselage, a submarine vehicle hull, a satellite payload shroud, etc.). The test-bed used for this comparison is a carbon-fiber composite panel manufactured with embedded active fiber composite actuators. Since such integrated structures constitute a continued avenue of research, the manufacturing and performance of this structure is illustrated. The design of the test-bed is guided by an effort to achieve a dynamic response similar to a single panel in a typical aircraft or rotorcraft fuselage. ng active control architectures for broadband acoustic radiation reduction are compared both analytically and experimentally on a representative structure to quantify the capabilities and limitations of the existing control methodologies. Specifically, three broad categories of control are compared: classical feedback (rate feedback), optimal feedback (linear quadratic Gaussian), and adaptive feedforward control (x -filtered least mean square). The control architectures implemented during this study are all single-input/single-output in order to allow a fair comparison of the issues involved in the design, as well as the use and performance of each approach. Both the vibration and the acoustic performance are recorded for each experiment under equivalent conditions to allow a generalizable comparison. Experimental results lead to conclusions pertaining to the application of active structural-based control to improve the acoustic performance of more complex structures.