Active Vibration Control of Flexible Structures with Super-Coiled Actuators

Flexible structures show low natural frequencies and light damping and often suffer from various dynamic loads, leading to low-frequency vibrations. Active vibration control is necessary for precision operation and long-term service of such structures, and a flexible actuator with a large actuation force and stroke is a key limitation. In this paper, super-coiled (SC) actuators, fabricated from fibers by twisting and inserting, were introduced to actively suppress the low-frequency vibration of flexible structures. Two SC actuators were symmetrically mounted on both surfaces of a cantilever beam to generate actuation forces. The force model of thermally driven SC actuators was developed, and a dynamic model of a cantilever beam with SC actuators was then proposed and validated via experimental actuation. Three types of control strategies, open loop, velocity negative feedback, and linear quadratic regulator (LQR), were adopted for vibration suppression. The results show that the proposed model fits quite well with the experimental data, and the maximum error between the experiment and the prediction is 3.90% among various driven currents. In velocity negative feedback control and LQR control, a 91.83% reduction of dynamic response is achieved, which validates the feasibility of using the actuator for low-frequency vibration control.