Author: Dan Wu

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

Structural vibration control is an important issue and has received considerable research attention in many industry applications. Researches investigated various approaches to reduce undesirable vibrations. The smart materials can control and suppress vibration in an efficient and “intelligent” way without causing much additional weight. The majority of research in smart damping materials has focused on the control of composite structure using embedded or bonded piezoelectric transducers. The advantages of piezoelectric materials include high achievable bandwidth, compactness, lightness, easy implementation and good electromechanical coupling characteristics, thus making them appropriate for actuators and sensors applications. Recently, a non-linear semi-passive vibration control technique, so-called Synchronized Switch Damping (SSD), has been developed. SSD technique relies on a cumulative build-up of the voltage resulting from the continuous switching of the piezoelectric voltage and it was shown that the performance is strongly related to this total voltage amplitude available. Based on SSD techniques, a new global approach for improved vibration damping of smart structure, based on global energy redistribution by means of a network of piezoelectric elements is proposed in this thesis. The objective of this work is to propose a new approach to increase the piezoelectric voltage (also related to the damping operative energy) in order to improve the damping performance. In the proposed semi-active approach, the extra energy used to improve this voltage is gathered on the various modes of the structure using an interconnected piezoelectric element network. Two original network topologies are developed for transferring energy. One is named SSDT for “Synchronized Switch Damping by energy Transfer”. The second is defined as SSDD for “Synchronized Switch Damping with Diode”. Performance evaluations and comparisons are performed on a model representative of a clamped plate equipped with piezoelectric elements in the case of multimodal motion. Compared to the Modal-SSDI method used as a baseline, simulation results and a global theoretical model are proposed demonstrating the relationship between the achievable damping improvement and the ratio of transferred energy to the structure mechanical energy, thus proving the capability of a network of piezoelectric elements for global energy management and redistribution in order to improve the vibration damping of smart structures.