Customized broadband structural vibration control using piezoelectric shunt absorbers

Piezoelectric (PZT) shunt absorbers have shown promise for the control of vibrating structures due to their appealing lightweight and tunable features. However, the complex coupling among multiple structural components including the PZT patches presents a significant challenge in achieving optimal design, which turns out to be tedious and computationally costly. In this study, based on the experimentally measured or numerically simulated vibration response of primary structures, casted in terms of extracted Excitation-Dependent Representative Basis, a novel design methodology is proposed to optimally design the parameters of a multi-degree-of-freedom shunt circuit over an arbitrarily given thin-walled structure to achieve pre-defined target vibration reduction. The proposed analysis framework alongside the corresponding simplified model greatly reduces the complexity of the dynamic analysis while still retaining the essential electromechanical interaction effects taking place inside the coupled system, thereby offering practical benefits for the design of the shunt absorbers. In particular, an inverse design method is proposed to achieve customized vibration control. The whole approach is shown to be computationally efficient, as the solutions can be directly derived from analytical expressions. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified through both numerical simulations and experiments.