Institute of Control Systems

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Structural Vibration Control Plant

Brief Description: The structural vibration control plant demonstrates properties of largescale flexible systems such as first and higher order mode shapes, natural frequencies and characteristic frequency responses.

      

 

The structural vibration control plant exhibits high order dynamics of flexible systems and is closely related to many control applications that aim at improved closed loop damping. The testbed has been built for research use in the framework of distributed systems and active damping of flexible systems that can be modelled by discretized partial differential equations.

The aluminium beam has a length of 4.8m, a width of 4cm, and a thickness of 3mm. It is equipped with 16 collocated pairs of piezoelectric actuators and sensors that are attached equidistantly along the beam.

Applying standard control design techniques to high order models, several limitations are encountered, due to the high connectivity and computational burden. Instead of a complex centralized model that describes the system dynamics, interconnected local models of smaller size are more attractive. Sixteen pairs of actuators and sensors spatially divide the beam into 16 interconnected subsystems with sensing and actuation capabilities.

Challenges with the plant include complex modelling of flexible dynamics with several significant higher order fast resonant modes, closed loop sensitivty against signal delays, control and observation spillover as well as high sampling rates for closed-loop control with 16 in- and outputs.

Export of Matlab/Simulink code to a real-time target provides rapid prototyping capabilities and allows actual hardware-in-the-loop evaluation of control algorithms.

The setup is suitable for a variety of different control methods such as centralized and distributed controller design as well as different system identification approaches.

Related publications:

  • Liu, Q, González, A. M, and Werner, H, "Distributed Control of Spatially-Interconnected Parameter-Invariant and LPV Models for Actuated Beams", in American Control Conference, 2014
  • Liu, Q, Hoffmann, C, and Werner, H, “Distributed Control of Parameter-Varying Spatially Interconnected Systems Using Parameter-Dependent Lyapunov Functions”, in American Control Conference, 2013, pp. 3278–3283.
  • Liu, Q, and Werner, H, "Experimental Identification of Spatially-Interconnected Parameter-Invariant and LPV Models for Actuated Beams", in 52nd Conference on Decision and Control, 2013