Experiments on Active Control of Plate Vibration Using Piezoelectric Actuators and Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) Modal Sensors

Abstract

An experiment was performed to investigate the implementation of shaped PVDF modal sensors on a simply supported rectangular plate to control specific modes of the vibration. The plate was excited by a steady-state harmonic point force while the control was achieved by two independent piezoelectric actuators bonded to the surface of the plate. A two-channel adaptive controller based on the multi-input multi-output filtered X LMS algorithm was used to provide feed-forward control. Two PVDF modal sensors were shaped such that the (3,1) mode was the dominant structural mode observed by the sensors. With this configuration, the amplitude of the (3,1) mode can be minimized regardless of excitation frequency. A comparative test was performed by using two accelerometers as error sensors. Results indicate that for both on and off-resonance excitations, the shaped PVDF modal sensors are superior to point-error sensors, such as accelerometers for controlling specific structural modes.