Application of the Electromechanical Surface Damping to the Vibration Control of a Cantilever Plate

Abstract

The electromechanical surface damping technique (EMSD) is applied to suppress the bending and twisting (torsional) peak vibration amplitudes of a cantilever plate. The technique is a combination of the constrained layer damping (CLD) and the shunted piezoelectric methods in which the constraining layer of the CLD is replaced by a shunted piezoelectric ceramic. The frequency responses, to a white noise random base excitation, of the EMSD-treated plate at the vicinity of the first and second bending and twisting resonant frequencies are determined and compared with the corresponding responses of the CLD treatment. It is shown that, in general, the EMSD treatment provides more suppression of the bending and twisting peak vibration amplitudes than the conventional CLD treatment. The EMSD treatment, however, is more effective at higher frequencies and lower temperatures, which suggests that the EMSD method can be applied to extend the effective range of frequencies and/ or temperatures of the conventional CLD method. The work presented is primarily analytical; however, a crude and preliminary experimental work is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the EMSD technique.