Semi-active vibration control of an aircraft panel using synchronized switch damping method

With the rapid development of the aerospace industry, the control of aircraft structural vibration becomes increasingly important. Semi-active vibration control method based on synchronized switch damping have been attracted more attention due to its robustness compared with passive approaches and simplicity compared with active approaches. In this paper, three SSD semi-active control methods combined with a modal observer were applied to multimodal vibration suppression of an aircraft panel with stiffeners, and their effectiveness was verified by experimental results. A state observer was built based on the experimentally identified state-space model of the panel. Modal displacement of the panel was identified on line using the state observer and used in switch control of different piezoelectric actuators. Since the vibration characteristics of the panel with stiffeners was very complicated and its natural frequencies were distributed densely, use of the identified modal displacement as the reference signal for voltage switching in SSDI, SSDV and SSDNC improved the control effect for some specific modes and simplified the system. Good performances of vibration suppression were achieved in both single-mode control and multimodal control.