Control of vibratory networks with passive and regenerative systems

This paper considers the use of both passive and regenerative control technologies, for suppression of vibrations in externally-excited electromechanical networks. The physical constraints on passive and regenerative systems result in control-theoretic constraints on the feedback laws they can each respectively impose. For ideal regenerative systems, this constraint is less restrictive than that of passive systems, leading to an improvement in the performance achievable. However, non-ideal regenerative systems exhibit parasitic losses, which tighten the associated constraint on control feasibility. In this paper we consider the optimization of passive and regenerative feedback laws, in the context of constrained multi-objective LQG control. In this context, we develop techniques to determine how low the parasitic losses in a regenerative system have to be, in order for its optimal feasible performance to exceed that of an optimal passive system. We demonstrate the analysis on an example pertaining to stochastic vibration suppression.