PD control for vibration attenuation in Hoop truss structure based on a novel piezoelectric bending actuator

Abstract With increasing of the geometry of various space structures, they easily bring low-frequency, longtime and more bending modal responses. Therefore, it is necessary to suppress effectually the vibration responses above. Adaptive structure design is a common method using the piezoelectric material. However, the conventional piezoelectric actuators hardly control effectually these responses owing to the inadequate actuated performance. This paper first introduces the design of a new dual-stack piezoelectric actuator, which has the bidirectional (can act in both push and pull directions) actuated advantage, using a pair of matching piezoelectric stacks within the actuator house. Two stacks are integrated in a mechanically opposing configuration and are electrically operated out of phase. Further, we design the piezoelectric bending actuator using two dual-stack piezoelectric actuators and a fixed device, and then a five-meter hoop truss can use it to perform the active vibration control. Here the truss is mainly applied to simulate a large hoop mesh antenna. Then, we set up the active control system based on the PD algorithm and build the simulation model by the Matlab/Simulink platform. The simulation results point out the PBA can produce enough actuated moment to suppress effectually the first-order modal response of the hoop truss. Finally, we perform three experiments including one uncontrolled case and two PD controlled cases. The two control cases mainly consider whether the driving voltages are offset or not. The experimental results of both control cases are in accordance with the better simulated analysis. The control ratios of the decay time of the first-order modal response are up to more than 30 percent in the simulations and experiments. That is, this bending actuator has good application foreground in controlling the bending modes of the spacecrafts with a larger size.