Lateral vibration modal control of a smart cantilever beam by electrode configuration of piezoelectric actuator

A single piezoelectric resonator shows better excitation efficiency at bending modes than other vibration modes and the inherent operating principle of piezoelectric actuators has limited its practical use to suppressing bending mode vibrations. To achieve effective non-bending modal vibration attenuation using only one piezoelectric actuator, this paper presents an active vibration control method according to the theory of electrode configuration. Finite element based modal analysis was performed to determine proper electrode configuration and its corresponding resonant mode for vibration suppression control. In this study the first lateral mode of the structure was adopted for experimental investigation. Two vibration control algorithms, positive-position-feedback control and proportional-derivational control, were applied to analyze the vibration control performance with inclusion of electrode configuration. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed active vibration control embedded with prudent electrode configuration can effectively suppress vibrations subject to lateral modal excitation.