Active vibration control of a smart cantilever beam on general purpose operating system

All mechanical systems suffer from undesirable vibrations during their operations. Their occurrence is uncontrollable as it depends on various factors. However, for efficient operation of the system, these vibrations have to be controlled within the specified limits. Light weight, rapid and multi-mode control of the vibrating structure is possible by the use of piezoelectric sensors and actuators and feedback control algorithms. In this paper, direct output feedback based active vibration control has been implemented on a cantilever beam using Lead Zirconate-Titanate (PZT) sensors and actuators. Three PZT patches were used, one as the sensor, one as the exciter providing the forced vibrations and the third acting as the actuator that provides an equal but opposite phase vibration/force signal to that of sensed so as to damp out the vibrations. The designed algorithm is implemented on Lab VIEW 2010 on Windows 7 Platform.