Vibration control by recursive time-delayed acceleration feedback

This paper presents a theoretical basis of time-delayed acceleration feedback control of linear and nonlinear vibrations of mechanical oscillators. The control signal is synthesized by an infinite, weighted sum of the acceleration of the vibrating system measured at equal time intervals in the past. The proposed method is shown to have controlled linear resonant vibrations, low-frequency non-resonant vibrations, primary and 1/3 subharmonic resonances of a forced Duffing oscillator. The concept of an equivalent damping and natural frequency of the system is also introduced. It is shown that a large amount of damping can be produced by appropriately selecting the control parameters. For some combinations of the control parameters, the effective damping factor of the system is shown to be inversely related to the time-delay in the small delay limit. Selection of the optimum control parameters for controlling the forced and free vibrations is discussed. It is shown that forced vibration is best controlled by unity recursive gain and smaller values of the time-delay parameter. However, the transient response can be optimally controlled by suitably selecting the time delay depending upon the gain. The delay values for the optimal forced response may be different from that required for the optimum transient response. When both are important, a suboptimal choice of the delay parameters with unity recursive gain is recommended.