Classes of Strongly Stabilizing Bandpass Controllers for Flexible Structures

""This paper proposes different design strategies of robust controllers for high-order plants. The design is tailored on the structure of the equations resulting from modeling flexible structures by using modal coordinates. Moreover, the control laws have some characteristics which make them specially suited for active vibration reduction, such as strong stabilization property and bandpass frequency shape. The approach is also targeted the case of more sensors than actuators, which is very frequent in practical applications. Indeed, actuators are often rather heavy and bulky, while small and light sensors may be placed more freely. In such cases, sensors can be usefully placed in the locations where the primary force fields act on the structure, so as to provide the controller with a direct information on the disturbance effects in terms of structural vibrations. Eventually, this approach may lead to uncolocated control strategies. The design problem is here solved by resorting to a Linear Matrix Inequality technique, which allows also to select the performance weights based on different design requirements, for example, a suitable bandpass frequency shape. Experimental results are presented for a vibration reduction problem of a stiffened aeronautical panel controlled by piezoelectric actuators."