Simultaneous placement of sensors and actuators for active vibration control systems

The optimization of sensors and actuators is widely studied in order to improve the performance of active vibration control systems of plate structures. Typically the problem is divided into two separate optimization steps; first optimizing the actuators with global sensor information’s and second optimizing a small set of sensors for the already optimized actuators. Due to the inherent influence of the sensor position on the actuator position and vice versa in feedforward control systems a simultaneous actuator and sensor optimization should be considered. Therefore, in this study the simultaneous actuator and sensor optimization for an active vibration control systems is addressed. Because of the frequent use of feedforward active vibration control systems in vibration and noise problems two cost functions are addressed in this study: global vibration reduction and sound power reduction. In order to show the effectiveness of the simultaneous actuator and sensor placement various simulations are conducted on a point force excited aluminum plate. The results are compared to the classical two step approach proposed in the literature