Optimized Placement of Piezoelectric Actuator for Multichannel Adaptive Vibration Control of a Stiffened Plate

The optimization of piezoelectric actuator placement has been widely investigated in connection with active vibration control. In this paper, a modified optimization criterion considering the control spillover effect is proposed based on modal controllability. A coupled model of a stiffened plate and piezoelectric stack actuators (PSAs) is designed. By the combination of a genetic algorithm and pattern search algorithm, a hybrid optimization method is developed to obtain the optimal installation locations of PSAs. Furthermore, an active control system is designed by multichannel filtered-x least-mean-square (FxLMS) algorithm to suppress the vibration responses of the stiffened plate subjected to broadband random excitation. Using the optimized placements of PSAs, active vibration control experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed optimization criterion. The experimental results show that the vibration responses of the first three modes of the system can be suppressed effectively. Furthermore, compared with the traditional optimization criterion, the use of the proposed optimization criterion can limit the undesirable effects of active control on residual modes. This study demonstrates that the proposed methodology could achieve improvement in active control performance, which can be applied to the vibration control of engineering structures under broadband random loads.