Design of shaped piezoelectric modal sensor for beam with arbitrary boundary conditions by using Adomian decomposition method

The theory for designing distributed piezoelectric modal sensors is well established for beam structures. However, the current modal sensor theory is limited in scope in that it can only be applied in the case of classical boundary conditions (i.e., either clamped, free, simply supported or sliding). In this paper a solution to the problem of finding the shape of piezoelectric modal sensors for a beam with arbitrary boundary conditions is proposed, using the Adomian decomposition method (ADM). A general expression for designing the shape of a piezoelectric modal sensor is presented, in which the output signal of the designed sensor is proportional to the response of the target mode. Other modes are filtered out. The modal sensor shape is expressed as a function of the second spatial derivative of the structural mode shape function. Based on the ADM and employing some simple mathematical operations, the closed-form series solution of the second spatial derivative of the mode shapes can be determined. Then the shapes of the designed modal sensors are obtained. Finally, some numerical examples are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed modal sensors. It is shown that, for classical boundary conditions, the shapes of the modal sensors based on the ADM agree well with analytical and numerical results given in the literature. For general boundary conditions it is found that the shape of the modal sensors is influenced by the number of modes of interest because the second spatial derivatives of the mode shapes are not orthogonal to one another. The modal sensors for general boundary conditions can be considered as modal filters within a limited frequency band.