XVIII Congresso Brasileiro de Automtica / 12 a 16-setembro-2010, Bonito-MS

ACTIVE MODAL DAMPING OF TRUSS STRUCTURES USING INTEGRAL CONTROL STRATEGY

GUSTAVO LUIZ C. M. ABREU, VICENTE LOPES JR.

GMSINT, Depto. de Engenharia Mecnica, Faculdade de Engenharia de Ilha Solteira-FEIS

Av Brasil, 56, 15385-000 Ilha Solteira, SP, Brasil
E-mails: gustavo@dem.feis.unesp.br, vicente@dem.feis.unesp.br

Abstract This paper presents an active modal damping control of a truss structure using one pair of piezoelectric stack actua-
tors collinear with force transducers and integral control strategy. A finite element model of the structure is constructed using the
three-dimensional frame elements considering electro-mechanical coupling between the host structure and piezoelectric stack ac-
tuator. In this paper, the active member placement is determined by using the fraction of modal strain energy as an optimal in-
dex. The integral controller, obtained by using the root locus technique, is designed to maximize modal damping of the truss
structure. The numerical simulation results illustrate that the active members of the structure and the integral controller can ef-
fectively reduce truss vibrations.

Keywords Active Damping, Truss Structure, Integral Control, Piezoceramic Stack Actuators, Finite Element Method.

1 Introduction

A truss structure is one of the most commonly
used structures in aerospace and civil engineering
(Yan and Yam, 2002). Because it is desirable to use
the minimum amount of material for construction, the
trusses are becoming lighter and more flexible which
means they are more susceptible to vibration. A con-
venient way of controlling a truss structure is to in-
corporate a piezoelectric stack actuator into one of
the truss members (Anthony and Elliot, 2005).
Research on damping of truss structures began in the
late 80s. Fanson et al. (1989), Chen et al. (1989) and
Anderson et al. (1990) developed active members
made of piezoelectric transducers. Preumont et al.
(1992) used a local control strategy to suppress the
low frequency vibrations of a truss structure using
piezoelectric actuators. Their strategy involved the
application of integrated force feedback using two
force gauges each collocated with the piezoelectric
actuators, which were fitted into different beam ele-
ments in the structure. Carvalhal et al. (2007) used an
efficient modal control strategy for the active vibra-
tion control of a truss structure. In that approach, a
feedback force is applied to each node to be con-
trolled according to a weighting factor that is deter-
mined by assessing how much each mode is excited
by the primary source.
An important feature of the truss structures control is
the collocation between the actuator and the sensor.
An actuator/sensor pair is said to be collocated if it is
physically located at the same place and energetically
conjugated, such as force and displacement or veloc-
ity, or torque and angle. The properties of collocated
systems are remarkable; in particular, the stability of
the control loop is guaranteed when certain simple,
specific controllers are used (Preumont, 2002). It
requires that the control architecture be decentralized,
i.e. that the feedback path include only one actua-
tor/sensor pair, and be thus independent of others
sensors or actuators possibly placed on the structure.
In this case, the control system consists of independ-
ent SISO loops, whose stability can be readily estab-
lished from the root locus technique.
The choice of the actuator/sensor location is another
important issue in the design of actively controlled
structures. The actuators/sensors should be placed at
locations so that the desired modes are excited most
effectively (Lammering et al., 1994). A wide variety
of optimization algorithms were proposed to this end
in the literature. Two popular examples are the Simu-
lated Annealing method (Chen et al., 1991) and the
Genetic Algorithm method (Rao et al., 1991). See
also Padula and Kincaid (1999) for review of the
different placement strategies for sensor and actuator.
Although these methods are effective, they fail to
give a clear physical justification for the choice of the
actuator/sensor placement. In this paper, it was cho-
sen a more physical method that has been used by
Preumont et al. (1992). It merely consists in placing
the transducer in the truss structure with maximal
fraction of modal strain energy which is a measure
that represents the ability of a vibration mode to con-
centrate the vibrational energy into the actuator and
can be interpreted as a compound indicator of con-
trollability and observability of the specific mode by
the actuator.
Active damping of truss structures with integral con-
trol was introduced at the beginning of the 90s
(Preumont et al., 1992) and has since been thor-
oughly studied both theoretically and experimentally
(Preumont, 2002). This paper investigates numeri-
cally an integral force feedback controller for sup-
pressing the undesired structural vibrations in a truss
structure containing piezoelectric stack actuators and
collocated force sensors forming a so-called
smart/intelligent truss structure. It is shown that the
control system consists of independent SISO loops,
i.e. a decentralized active damping with local control-
lers connecting each actuator to its collocated force

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sensor. It is also demonstrated that this control prob-
lem can be formulated with the root locus approach.
2 The Truss Structure
The truss structure used in this work is depicted
in Fig. 1. It consists of 12 bays of 140 mm each, ma-
de of steel bars of 4 mm diameter connected with
plastic joints (mass block of 70g) and clamped at the
bottom. It is equipped with active member as indi-
cated in the Fig. 1. It consists of a piezoelectric linear
actuator collinear with a force transducer.
f = baT x
rial stacked together. The force exerted by the active
member is defined by Preumont (2002)
f a = K a ( na d33V ) (2)
where Ka is the stiffness of the actuator, d33 is the
piezoelectric coefficient, V is the voltage applied to
the piezo that produces an free expansion , and is
the projection of the displacements at the end nodes
of the active member i.e., is the sum of the free
piezoelectric expansion () and the elastic displace-
ment (fa/Ka).
The elongation is linked to the structural displace-
ment by
(3)

Detail of the active member The equation governing the structure containing the
active member can be found by substituting Eqs. (2)
and (3) with Eq. (1); the new equation is

Force transducer fa
( )
M&x& + Cx& + K + K ababaT x = bf + ba K a na d33V (4)

where K is the stiffness matrix of the structure ex-

cluding the axial stiffness of the actuator.
= nd 33V The equation (4) can be transformed into modal co-
V ordinates according to x = , where
= [1 2 K n ] is the matrix of the mode
Piezoelectric shapes, solutions of the eigenvalue problem:
linear actuator
( )
M&x& + K + K a ba baT x = 0 . Assuming normal modes
normalized according to T M = I and introducing
the modal state vector xn = [ & ] , the transformed
T

Active equation of motion (4) becomes

Member
x&n = An xn + Bn1 f + Bn 2V (5)

Figure 1. Truss structure with an active member where

0 I 0
An = , Bn1 = T ,
2.1 Governing Equations K C b
(6)
Consider the linear structure of Fig. 1 equipped 0
with a discrete, massless piezoelectric stack trans- Bn 2 = T
b K n d
a a a 33
ducer. The equation governing the motion of the
structure excited by a force f and controlled by the
piezoelectric actuator (fa) is
( )
and K = diag i2 , C = diag (2 i i ) , i is the i-th
natural frequency of the truss and i is the associ-
M&x& + Cx& + Kx = bf + ba f a (1) ated modal damping.
Similarly to Eq. (2), the output signal of the force
where K and M are the stiffness and mass matrices of
sensor, proportional to the elastic extension of the
the structure, obtained by means of the finite element
truss, is defined by
model using the three-dimensional frame elements
(Kwon and Bang, 1997) (each node has six degrees y = Cn 2 xn + Dn 22V (7)
of freedom), C is the damping matrix; b and ba are,
respectively, the influence vectors showing the loca- where
tions of the external forces (f) and the active member
in the global coordinates of the truss (the non-zero [ ]
Cn 2 = K a baT 0 , Dn 22 = K a na d33
(8)
components of ba are the direction cosines of the ac-
tive bar in the structure), and fa is the force exerted by
the active member.
Consider the piezoelectric linear transducer of Fig. 1
is made of na identical slices of piezoceramic mate-

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3 Actuator Placement Considering the main characteristics of both trans-

More than any specific control law, the location
of the active member is the most important factor
affecting the performance of the control system.
Good control performance requires the proper loca-
tion of the actuator to achieve good controllability.
The active member should be placed where its au-
thority over the modes it is intended to control is
largest. It can be achieved if one locates the trans-
ducer in order to maximize the mechanical energy
stored in it. The ability of a vibration mode to con-
centrate the vibrational energy into the transducer is
measured by the fraction of modal strain energy vi
defined by (Preumont, 2002)
( )
iT K ababaT i ( )
K a baT i
2
vi =
(
iT K + K ababaT i ) =
i2
(9)
The Eq. (9) is readily interpreted as the ratio between
the strain energy in the actuator and the total strain
energy when the structure vibrates according to i-th
mode. Physically, vi can be interpreted as a com-
pound indicator of controllability and observability of
mode i by the transducer. The best location consists
in placing the transducer in the truss structure with
maximal fraction of modal strain energy vi, where i is
the mode to be controlled.
In this work, the control objective is to damp the first
two modes of the structure by using two active ele-
ments. The search for candidate locations where
these active members can be placed is greatly as-
sisted by the examination of the first two structural
mode shapes as can be seen in Fig. 2.
ducers as: Ka = 65 N/m and nad33 = 6.31510-7
m/Volts, the fractions of modal strain energy vi, com-
puted from Eq. (9), are shown in Table 1 for the first
six structural elements (see Fig. 2a).
Table 1. Fraction of modal strain energy in the selected finite
elements.
Element v1 (%) v2 (%)
1 0.92 2.60
2 4.27 0.92
3 0.23 5.44
4 1.46 3.23
5 3.36 0.50
6 0.21 4.05
From the Fig. 2 and the Tab. 1 one can see that active
member number 2 has a large influence on mode 1
and almost no influence on mode 2, and that the op-
posite occurs for active member number 3 i.e., substi-
tuting the active member for the bar 2 provides a
strong control on mode 1 (v1 = 4.27 %), but offers a
reasonable control on mode 2 (v2 = 0.92 %). By con-
trast, an active member substituted for the bar 3 of-
fers almost no control on mode 1 (v1 = 0.23 %) and
good controllability on mode 2 (v2 = 5.44 %). This
result motivated the positions of the transducers in
the actual truss.
4 Integral Controller Design
Consider the truss structure with the active mem-
bers of section 3. Each active member consists of a
piezoelectric linear actuator collocated with a force
transducer. In this section, it is considered a decen-
tralized active damping with local controllers con-
necting each actuator to its collocated force sensor.
Hence, assuming one pair of actuator/sensor, the re-
sponse of the truss (Eq. 4) to a control input voltage
(V) can be written alternatively, in Laplace form, by

[Ms + (K + K b b )] x = b K n d
2 T
a a a a a a 33V (s )
(10)

where the damping matrix C and the external forces f

have been omitted for simplicity.
13 15 According to the integral control technique (Preu-
14
mont, 2002), the collocated force sensor (y) is inte-
10
11
12
grated and fed back to the control input voltage (V)
9
g y (s )
V (s ) =
7
8 (11)
4 6
K a na d 33 s
5

1 3
where g is the gain of the controller and the constant
2
K a n a d 33 at the denominator is for normalization
purpose.
(a) (b) (c)
Note that the negative sign in Eq. (11) is combined
Figure 2. a) disposition of the active elements; b) first mode shape with the negative sign of the force output (Eq. 7 or 2)
and c) second mode shape to produce a positive feedback. The integral term 1/s
introduces a 90 phase shift in the feedback path and

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thus damping in the system (Chen et al, 1989). It also

introduces a -20 dB/dec slope in the open-loop fre-
quency response, and thus reduces the risks of spill-
2 2
Is +
g
s+g
(
T KababaT = 0 ) (16)

over instability (Preumont, 2002).
Combining Eqs. (11) and (7) or (2), yields After using the definition (9) of the fraction of modal
strain energy, Eq. (16) is reduced to a set of decoup-
g baT x led equations
V (s ) = (12)
na d33 s + g
gi
s 2 + i2 vii2 = 0 (17)
Substituting (12) into (10), one gets the closed-loop s + gi
characteristic equation
For a small gain gi, one can assume a solution of (17)
2
( T
Ms + K + Kababa
s
g
+ g
)
KababaT ( )
x = 0 (13)
of the form s i i j i (Preumont, 2002), where
i is the closed-loop structural damping ratio of

mode i, this results approximately in (neglecting the
From this equation, for g 0 terms of the second order in i )

[Ms + (K + K b b )] x = 0
2 T
a a a
(14)
i
gi vi
(18)
2i
which corresponds to the situation when the elec-
trodes of the piezoelectric transducer (see Fig. 1) are which provides a formal justification for the place-
short-circuited. The solutions of the eigenvalue prob- ment of the active members in the places where vi is
lem (14) are the open-loop poles ( i - resonance maximum, as suggested in section 3.
frequencies). Finally, it can be demonstrated (Preumont, 2002) that
On the other hand, for g the maximum modal damping is achieved for

[Ms 2
]
+K x=0 (15) gi = i
i
zi
(19)

which corresponds to the situation where the axial

contribution of the active member has been removed The preceding result has been established for a single
(corresponding to the stiffness matrix K). The solu- active member; if there are several active members
tions of Eq. (15) are the open-loop zeros ( z i - anti- operating with the same control law and the same
resonance frequencies). gain g, this result can be generalized under similar
assumptions.
Figure 3 shows the evolution of the closed-loop poles
when g increases from 0 to + (only one half of the
locus is shown). The pole trajectories go from the 5 Simulations and Numerical Results
open-loop poles ( i ) to the open-loop zeros ( z i ).
Im(s) Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate
the efficacy of the integral controller applied to the
2 truss structure. The structure considered is the 12-bay
z2 of 140 mm each with 111 members and 41 nodes,
Structure
1 and the nodes at the bottom are clamped (see Fig. 1).
z1 The passive members are made of steel with a diame-
ter of 4 mm, and the damping is assumed to be pro-
Integrator
portional to the stiffness and mass matrices so that C
Re(s) = 10-1M + 10-7K. At each node there is a centralized
mass block of 70g and has six degrees of freedom
Figure 3. Root locus of the structure (for two modes) with integral (dof), translations and rotations in x, y and z direc-
control
tions, so the truss structure has 228 active dofs, and
the state-space model consequently has an order of
It is readily established from the root locus (Fig. 3) 456. The strategy is to control the first two modes
that the system is unconditionally stable for every (17.80 Hz and 20.61 Hz) by using two active mem-
value of the gain g (Preumont, 2002). bers positioned in the finite elements shown in Fig.
To evaluate the i-th modal damping ( i ), Eq. (13) 2a, and two decentralized integral controllers (Eq.
must be transformed in modal coordinates with the 12) connecting each actuator (considering Ka = 65
change of variables x = . Assuming that the mode N/m and nad33 = 6.31510-7 m/Volts) to its collo-
shapes have been normalized according to cated force sensor.
T M = I and taking into account that
( ) ( )
T K + K a ba baT = diag i2 = 2 , yields

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5.1 Controller Design 4

Force Transducer 2

Open-loop
In practice, it is not advisable to implement plain 3
Closed-loop

integral control (11), because it would lead to satura-

2
tion. A forgetting factor () can be introduced by
slightly moving the pole of the compensator from the 1

Amplitude (N)
origin to the negative real axis, leading to (Preumont, 0
2002)
-1

gi y (s )
Vi (s ) = (20) -2
K a na d33 s +
-3

with lower than the first natural frequency of the -4

structure. In this paper, is assumed be equal to 0 1 2 3 4 5
Time (s)
6 7 8 9 10

1 / 2 .
Figure 5. Uncontrolled and controlled responses at the force trans-
Table 2 presents the open-loop poles ( i - solutions ducer 2 with impulsive disturbance forces
of 14) and open-loop zeros ( z i - solutions of 15), in
This type of force is used as it will excite many
rad/s, when either actuator 1 or actuator 2 is active. modes of vibration and hence is a difficult test for the
control system. From the results it can be observed
Table 2. Open-loop poles and open-loop zeros of the structure. that the sensor responses are reduced greatly. Figure
6 presents the corresponding control voltages.
Actuator Mode i zi
0.15
Actuator 1
1 1 111.76 70.24 Actuator 2
0.1
2 2 127.92 107.48
0.05

Note that zi is lower than the corresponding pole i as

0
Voltage (V)

shown in Fig. 3. When the distance between zi and i

increases, consequently the gain g and the modal -0.05

damping i increase as shown in Eqs. (19) and (18).

-0.1
Substituting the corresponding zi and i in Eq. (19),
the following results are obtained: g1 = 140.97 for the -0.15

first mode and g 2 = 139.56 for the second mode. -0.2

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Time (s)

Figure 6. Feedback control voltages applied by the piezoelectric

5.2 Simulation Results
actuators with impulsive disturbance forces.
To verify the controller performance numeri- A time-varying chirp forces f (amplitude of 10 N)
cally, open loop and closed loop simulations were from 1 Hz to 20 Hz with a target time of 3 seconds
conducted and the results are presented and dis- are applied in all directions on each node at the top of
cussed. Impulsive forces are applied in all directions the structure (see Fig. 1). The uncontrolled and con-
on each node at the top of the structure (see Fig. 1). trolled responses of the force transducers 1 and 2 in
The uncontrolled and controlled responses of the time domain are shown in Figs. 7 and 8.
force transducers 1 and 2 in time domain are shown
in Figs. 4 and 5. 8000
Force Transducer 1

Force Transducer 1 Open-loop

8 Closed-loop
6000
Open-loop
Closed-loop
6 4000

4 2000
Amplitude (N)

0
Amplitude (N)

-2000
0

-4000
-2
-6000

-4
-8000
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
-6 Time (s)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Time (s)
Figure 7. Uncontrolled and controlled responses at the force trans-
Figure 4. Uncontrolled and controlled responses at the force trans- ducer 1 with time-varying disturbance forces
ducer 1 with impulsive disturbance forces

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3000
Force Transducer 2 References
Open-loop
Closed-loop

2000 Anderson, E. H.; Moore, D. M. and Fanson, J. L.

(1990). Development of an Active Truss
1000 Element for Control of Precision Structures.
Optical Engineering, Vol. 29, N 11, pp. 1333-
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Figure 9. Feedback control voltage applied by the piezoelectric
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6 Conclusions
An integral controller was designed and numerically
implemented on a truss structure containing a pair of
piezoelectric linear actuators collinear with force
transducers. The procedure used for placing actuators
along the structure was proven to be effective. Be-
sides, the optimal index has a strong intuitive appeal.
The integral controller, obtained by using the root
locus technique, was designed to maximize modal
damping of the truss structure. The control system
consisted of a decentralized active damping with lo-
cal controllers connecting each actuator to its collo-
cated force sensor. A set of numerical simulations
was performed, which illustrated the effectiveness of
the developed controller in reducing the vibrations of
a truss structure. The experimental tests however, are
relegated to the future.
Acknowledgments
The first author would like to thank the FAPESP (N
2008/05129-3) for the financial support of the re-
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