Vibration suppression of an elastic beam via sliding mode control

This paper presents experimental results of sliding mode control (SMC) technique applied to an elastic beam. The aim of the controller is to suppress first two vibration modes of the beam. Mathematical model of the beam is a finite dimensional model obtained from the Bernoulli-Euler beam equation. As the system states are to be available in order to design the SMC, an observer has been designed to obtain the states of the system by measuring tip deflection of the beam. By using observed states of the finite dimensional model, SMC is designed and applied to the elastic beam giving thoroughly suppressed vibration modes