6 - Active Control of Vibration in Structures.pdfVIP

6 Active Control of Vibration in Structures 6.1 Introduction In this chapter we review a number of different approaches to the active control of mechanical vibration in structures. These approaches are distinguished from those discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 in that the structure is now assumed to be governed by a partial differential equation rather than an ordinary differential equation. In other words, the structure is assumed to be distributed rather than having lumped springs, masses and dampers. There are a number of ways of describing the motion of such a structure, each of which is consistent with the governing partial differential equation. One way of expressing the velocity distribution over an entire structure, for example, is in terms of the sum of the contributions from a number of structural modes. Another approach is to describe the motion in terms of the amplitudes of a number of different types of mechanical waves in the structure. Both of these representations and their relation to each other were discussed in Chapter 2. The most efficient description, which requires the fewest parameters to describe the motion of the structure, will depend very much on the geometry of the structure, its boundary conditions and the frequency of excitation. These two descriptions of the motion of a distributed structure lead to two rather different approaches to active control. The first concentrates on controlling the modes of a structure. By actively reducing the amplitudes of these structural modes the space- average mean square velocity over the whole structure is reduced, and the control can be said to be global. It should be emphasised that reducing the total vibratio