Active control of smart beam vibrations with piezoelectric actuators

Over the last two decades, a great deal of research has been conducted on active control technologies to control vibrations of mechanical systems. Using piezoelectric components for active vibration control has gained a lot of interest in recent years. The studies in this thesis aimed to manufacture smart beam and perform an active vibration control with piezoelectric materials. In the numerical study, background theories and brief information are summed up, followed by mathematical model of the system is developed. By solving the equations of beam motion, the mode shape function and natural frequencies of the system are obtained. Analytical and ANSYS finite element analysis results are compared. Active control of free and forced vibrations of smart beam models which is created by ANSYS and MATLAB are simulated by using Simulink program. Experimental set-up consists of an aluminium beam surface bonded piezoelectric patches that used as an actuator and a sensor. Experimental study has been conducted to perform active vibration control with designed PID and Fuzzy PID controllers by using MATLAB/Simulink programs on this cantilever smart beam. The theoretical and experimental results are compared. It is observed that with the Fuzzy PID control algorithm up to 95.6% vibration suppression is achieved.