Active damping control of critical mode vibrations in large flexible space structures

The problem of vibration suppression in large flexible space structures (LFSSs) is investigated in this paper. Based on the structure property of LFSSs, an active damping strategy is proposed to attenuate the critical vibrations of the structure subject to modeling uncertainty and external disturbance. Control algorithms are derived with the aim of suppressing both the vibrating magnitude and vibrating rate to an acceptable level. It is shown that the strategy exhibits robust and adaptive properties and is truly model-independent. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the fact that it is fairly easy to set up the strategy and the overall computation involved is much less than any other strategies available to date. A two bay truss is used to verify the validity of the proposed approach.