Active vibration control of joined conical-cylindrical shells based on virtual sensing and voltage modes

In the active feedback vibration control of continuous structures, outputs are significant to the control effect, and usually, they are measured by physical sensors that are positioned at specific spatial locations within the dynamic system. In many scenarios, sensors can be placed directly at the positions of interest. However, in certain situations, it may be impractical or undesirable to deploy sensors at all the desired locations. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel active vibration control method based on virtual sensing technology. The active control is realized by integrating Macro Fiber Composite (MFC) patches into the main structure to act as the actuators and sensors. The main structure studied in this paper is a joined conical-cylindrical shell. The electromechanical coupling dynamic model of the intelligent structures is formulated based on the eight-node super-parametric shell element and Hamilton’s principle. In order to apply virtual sensing when using piezoelectric material for sensing, the concept of voltage mode is proposed. On the other hand, in order to update the voltage modes obtained by the FEM model, the operational modal analysis (OMA) is introduced, and the local correspondence (LC) principle is applied. The controller is designed by the PID algorithm. As a result, the active vibration control at sensor-less positions on the structure can be realized. The theoretical results are verified by the simulation and experimental works.