Active Vibration Control by Maximum Power Absorption

The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel active control strategy to reduce noise and vibration. Much work has been done on the active control of noise and vibration. However, one of the limitations of the technique is that controllers tend to be application-specific. Careful identification of the system to be controlled and reference signals are essential and that often proves difficult to arrange. Hence a versatile control strategy, which is non-application-specific, has been sought in this research. The power absorbed by an active vibration controller was taken as a cost function to be maximised. Theoretical investigations into simple string models have been conducted with this idea, suggesting that power absorption maximisation within the time taken for a wave emitted by the controller to come back to the control point, i.e. within a sing around time, is promising. A maximum power absorber based on this strategy was developed for experimental purposes, and applied to string and plate models for its validation study. These experiments confirmed that the absorber attenuates vibration effectively, supporting the good prospect of this control strategy.