Improvement of aeroelastic stability of hingeless helicopter rotor blade by passive piezoelectric damping

To augment weakly damped lag mode stability of a hingeless helicopter rotor blade in hover, piezoelectric shunt with a resistor and an inductor circuits for passive damping has been studied. A shunted piezoceramics bonded to a flexure of rotor blade converts mechanical strain energy to electrical charge energy which is dissipated through the resistor in the R-L series shunt circuit. Because the fundamental lag mode frequency of a soft-in-plane hingeless helicopter rotor blade is generally about 0.7/rev, the design frequency of the blade system with flexure sets to be so. Experimentally, the measured lag mode frequency is 0.7227/rev under the short circuit condition. Therefore the suppression mode of this passive damping vibration absorber is adjusted to 0.7227/rev. As a result of damping enhancement using passive control, the passive damper which consists of a piezoelectric material and shunt circuits has a stabilizing effect on inherently weakly damped lag mode of the rotor blades, at the optimum tuning and resistor condition.