Active Control of Flexible Beams Subjected to External Moving Forces

Modern microdrilling machines and flexible robot manipulators require high-speed, light-weight and high-precision to increase quality and productivity. Because of these demands, vibration control of flexible structures subject to external moving force becomes a very important issue for high performance mechanical system. In this paper, arbitrary n critical vibration modes of elastic structures produced by moving loads are actively suppressed by an independent modal-space controller. Therefore, vibrational amplitude of the flexible beams is minimized and the performance of the dynamic systems can be improved. In order to assure that dynamic equations can be solved for more comprehensive situations, finite element analysis is employed to formulate the open-loop governing equations. A laboratory experiment has been designed to demonstrate the performance of the controlled dynamic system. Experimental results are compared with numerical simulations in both open-loop and closed-loop systems. Good agreement is achieved between experimental measurements and theoretical prediction.