Kanjuro Makihara

Energy-recycling semi-active method for vibration suppression with piezoelectric transducers

*A novel energy-recycling method is studied that enables effective semi-active vibration suppression with piezoelectric transducers embedded or bonded to a structure. In this method, the energy converted from the mechanical energy of a vibrating structure is collected in the capacitor of a piezoelectric transducer as an electric charge, and to suppress vibration, rather than dissipate the energy, the polarity of the charge is changed according to the state of vibration. With this method, no energy is supplied to the total system of the structure and transducers with shunt circuit, which means that the system is stable. A simple electric circuit and a control law for multiple-degree-offreedom systems with multiple piezoelectric transducers are proposed for this method based on energy recycling. Numerical simulation of vibration suppression of a truss structure shows that this method is more effective in suppressing vibration than both a semi-active method without energy-recycling and that based on the use of an optimally tuned passive system. A preliminary experiment with a truss structure also shows that this method can effectively suppress vibration in an actual structure. However, there was some discrepancy in the experimental results compared to the results of the numerical simulation performed assuming ideal linear characteristics of the piezoelectric transducers estimated from a static test. Nomenclature

Low-Energy-Consumption Hybrid Vibration Suppression Based on an Energy-Recycling Approach

An innovative method of hybrid vibration suppression using piezoelectric materials is proposed. It combines bang‐bang active vibration suppression and energy-recycling semiactive vibration suppression. The piezoelectric materials are electromechanically coupled and convert mechanical energy into electrical energy and vice versa. With this method, a part of the electrical energy needed for suppressing vibration is obtained from the mechanical energy of the vibrating structures and is efficiently recycled. Furthermore, the actively supplied energy is stored in the transducers and is reused many times for vibration suppression. Therefore, the hybrid method has better performance than the case where the bang‐bang active method and the energy-recycling semiactive method are both used, but independently. The hybrid method saves the actively supplied energy and is thus a low-energyconsumption vibration control. Its effectiveness in suppressing vibrations was proven in numerical simulations and experiments using a 10-bay truss structure. Moreover, a novel method to prevent undesired control chattering is proposed to further save energy supplied from the external source.

A self-sensing method for switching vibration suppression with a piezoelectric actuator

This paper discusses a self-sensing vibration suppression method that measures only the value of the piezoelectric voltage. The method separates the electrical status into two cases concerning electrical current and characterizes each of these to establish a self-sensing system using extended system equations and a Kalman filter. Our self-sensing system can avoid estimation blackout during closed-circuit status and lessen harmful influences from residual modes. Experiments revealed that the self-sensing system suppressed vibrations in cooperation with state-switching and synchronized-switching controls. We confirmed that the self-sensing method is robust against model errors in a vibration suppression experiment in which there are model errors caused by an intentional frequency shift.

Comprehensive Assessment of Semi-Active Vibration Suppression Including Energy Analysis

This paper presents an extensive investigation on the LR-switching method (also called the energy-recycling semi-active method). Compared with the energy-dissipative R-switching method, the LR-switching method has been shown to have significantly better vibration suppression performance. However, certain essential issues affecting a system employing the LR-switching method remained to be dealt with. In particular, we had to clarify its vibration suppression mechanism from the viewpoint of mechanical and electrical energy exchange. Second, the robustness of the method against model errors and control time delays had to be verified. The experiments and numerical simulations that we conducted on a 10-bay truss structure demonstrate that the LR-switching method outperforms other suppression methods under sinusoidal and random excitations, which are more common in real systems and more difficult to deal with than transient vibrations. This paper provides fundamental insights on the LR-switching method and gives the method a guarantee for actual applications.

Novel Approach to Self-Sensing Actuation for Semi-Active Vibration Suppression

A novel self-sensing method using piezoelectric actuators for semi-active vibration suppression is proposed and investigated. By using extended system equations, this self-sensing method can be implemented with a Kalman filter instead of the conventional bridge circuit technique. The method separates electrical status into two cases concerning electrical current, and characterizes each of these to establish the self-sensing system. This method is applicable to multiple-degree-of-freedom structures with multiple piezoelectric actuators. A numerical vibration suppression simulation demonstrated that the self-sensing method works well on a truss structure and has significant robustness against parameter variations. Experimental results also demonstrated that the self-sensing method suppresses not only single-mode vibration but also multiple-mode vibration.

New approach to semi-active vibration isolation to improve the pointing performance of observation satellites

A momentum-wheel installed to provide attitude-control torque actually produces undesirable force or torque disturbances owing to wheel imbalance and imperfection of the ball-bearings. To improve the pointing performance of observation satellites, a vibration isolator is used to isolate observation devices from these disturbances. This paper compares three types of semi-active isolators that consist of a piezoelectric material and a switch-controlled passive circuit. Since this isolation is implemented by controlling a circuit switch no external energy is supplied to the system, and so the system is stable even when a malfunction occurs in control. We propose a simple but effective isolation method that needs to know only one velocity value instead of the full state of the system. Numerical simulations with a simple model of an observation satellite demonstrated that the proposed isolator works well to isolate an observation device from disturbances caused by the momentum-wheel, without causing any degradation in the attitude control of satellites.

Innovative Digital Self-Powered Autonomous System for Multimodal Vibration Suppression

A novel invention, a digital self-powered autonomous system, is proposed to achieve sophisticated vibration suppression dealing with multimodal vibrations. This vibration suppressor can be used ubiquitously at any site because it does not require an external power supply or a central control authority. The digital approach enables the system to be programmed, and thus, it affords some versatility with regard to control schemes. The proposed system is a vast improvement over conventional analog-autonomous systems whose fine-tuning is very difficult. The digital unit can be implemented in multi-input/multi-output systems to suppress complicated structural vibrations, such as multimodal vibrations. This paper provides an analytical discussion on the energy-harvesting effect on suppression performance in terms of the power balance andflow.Experiments demonstrate that the vibrationmagnitude reduces dramatically by as much as 79.7% under force excitation, although the self-powered control unit is used.

Stability Analysis of Open-loop Stiffness Control to Suppress Self-excited Vibrations

We present stability investigations on vibration cancelling employing three different types of variable-stiffness actuators. A two-mass system is considered, with a base mass attached to the ground and a top mass connected to the base mass. The top mass is subject to self-excitation forces. The stiffness of an actuator connecting the base mass and the ground may change with time, according to a predetermined control frequency, for cancelling vibrations. Numerical simulation is employed as the basic tool to investigate the system and to carry out parameter studies. The stability of the system is determined by calculating the eigenvalues of the state transition matrix. Robustness of the proposed methods for vibration cancelling is discussed with respect to various aspects.

Using tuned electrical resonance to enhance bang-bang vibration control

We enhanced the bang-bang vibration control by using an electrical resonance mechanism. The bang-bang method is used in many engineering applications because of its simplified hardware configuration in which a constant-voltage supplier is shared by multiple actuators. However, its control performance is restricted, because the supplied voltage is constant and the sharp modulation of the control input induces chattering, which wastes a significant amount of energy. Our approach to overcome these problems was to combine the bang-bang method with tuned electrical resonance. Based on an elaborate analysis of phase relations between mechanical and electrical vibrations, three switching logics were devised for the hybrid method. Experiments on a 10-bay truss structure demonstrated that our hybrid method not only enhanced vibration suppression of the bang-bang method, but also prevented control chattering.

A novel controller to increase harvested energy from negating vibration-suppression effect

This paper proposes an innovative energy-harvesting controller to increase energy harvested from vibrations. Energy harvesting is a process that removes mechanical energy from a vibrating structure, which necessarily results in damping. The damping associated with piezoelectric energy harvesting suppresses the amplitude of mechanical vibration and reduces the harvested energy. To address this critical problem, we devise an energy-harvesting controller that maintains the vibration amplitude as high as possible to increase the harvested energy. Our proposed switching controller is designed to intentionally stop the switching action intermittently. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed control scheme successfully increases the harvested energy. The piezoelectric voltage with the proposed controller is larger than that with the original synchronized switching harvesting on inductor (SSHI) technique, which increases the harvested energy. The stored energy with our controller is up to 5.7 times greater than that with the conventional SSHI control scheme.