Design based Active Vibration Control of a flexible structure using shape memory alloy wire actuators

Active Vibration Control using smart materials is explored due to their characteristics of adaptation to changing environmental and working conditions. Much of the research is motivated by aerospace, biomedical and robotics industry where lightly damped flexible structures characterized by low frequency high magnitude are common. With the use of smart materials active vibration suppression becomes ease in various fields. In this work shape memory alloy (Nickel Titanium) wires are used as actuators for active vibration suppression of a piezoceramic laminated flexible cantilever beam, which is characterized by low natural frequency with closely spaced modes. Vibration control is experimentally performed at the first modal resonance frequency of the beam at which the magnitude of vibration is maximum. Pulse width modulation technique is adopted to control the actuation force through Matlab/Simulink via a data acquisition system. The aim is to implement a design based On-Off control rather than a model based control.