Modeling and control of an electro-mechanical ballscrew actuator for vibration active damping

The damping of vibrations on aircrafts and rotorcrafts can provide life extension and weight reduction on those structures on which the vibration load is a significant amount of load endurance spectrum. In this work, a hybrid active-passive inertial actuator system is presented. It is based on a ballscrew based actuator, and the power generation is provided by an open windings three phase motor controlled by a dual inverter. Open windings drives allow to achieve greater torque generation with the same DC bus voltage. The PWM is generated accordingly to a novel algorithm based on a combination of two standard SVM algorithms, one for each inverter. The current controller has been tested on a real test bench at the designed working frequency. Also, a force controller has been designed and tested to verify the force values that can be delivered by the actuator at the designed working frequency.