Semi-Active Vibration Control of CFRP Beam Structures Using Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

The present paper treats a semi-active vibration control based on a synchronized switch damping (SSD) technique. To enhance the performance of semi-active vibration control method, the piezoelectric energy harvesting techniques are adopted instead of constant voltage sources in SSD on voltage sources (SSDV). This harvesting technique exploits the property of piezoelectric vibration to electricity converters, and requires no external voltage source. An experimental verification of the present vibration suppression method named as a synchronized switch damping on piezoelectric energy harvesters (SSDP) for CFRP cantilevered beams is carried out. The experimental results show that the proposed vibration control method is effective for vibration suppression of composite structures as well as SSDV technique. It is also shown that there exist threshold values of generated voltage of the piezoelectric element and excitation frequency of the cantilevered beam in energy harvesting device for achieving stable control effect based on the present method.