Active vibration control of a super element model of a thin-walled structure

Reducing vibration in flexible structures has become a pivotal engineering problem and shifted the focus of many research endeavors. One technique to achieve this target is to implement an active control system. A conventional active control system is composed of a vibrating structure, a sensor to perceive the vibration, an actuator to counteract the influence of disturbances causing vibration, and finally a controller to generate the appropriate control signals. In this work, different linear controllers are used to attenuate the vibrations of a cantilevered smart beam excited by its first eigenmode. A finite element (FE) model of the smart beam is initially created and then modified by using experimental data. The FE model is then reduced to a super element (SE) model with a finite number of degrees of freedom (DOF). Controllers are applied directly to the SE and the results are presented and compared.