Vibration suppression of structures with densely spaced modes using maximally robust minimum delay digital finite impulse response filters

Due to the inherent flexibility of engineering structures, transient and residual vibrations occur when a motion command is applied, thus raising several practical restrictions concerning their fast, accurate and safe motion. Although various command-preconditioning techniques have been proposed for the effective suppression of the excited vibrations, their application has been limited only to structures with a few distinct and well-separated modes. This paper further considers the applicability of motion preconditioning methods for a large class of lightweight flexible structures, which present multiple densely spaced natural modes, existing even at relatively low frequencies. Properly designed finite impulse response (FIR) filters can lead to an effective motion preconditioning method, suppressing drastically the excited vibrations over the entire excited frequency band. Compared to other alternative preconditioning methods, such as input shapers or infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, FIR filters present the most efficient behavior in terms of vibration suppression efficiency, or in terms of the delay introduced in the motion command, as verified by numerical simulations and experimental results involving multibay trusses, with tenths of densely spaced modes in a range from 0.4 Hz up to 75 Hz.