Active vibro-acoustic control of a flexible beam using distributed control

In this paper distributed control is applied to control the noise radiation of a flexible structure. The purpose is to investigate the effectiveness and ease of implementation versus current methods. As an illustrative example a simple supported beam is chosen. It is shown that the distributed controller is able to control the noise by penalizing the velocity states and it is shown that this results in less noise radiation, both in the near and far field. The distributed controller outperforms a local velocity feedback controller. Also, in comparison to local velocity feedback, it has the advantage that stability is guaranteed when the actuators are not assumed to be point actuators.