Optimization of Piezoelectric Sensor-Actuator for Plate Vibration Control Using Evolutionary Computation: Modeling, Simulation and Experimentation

The development of lightweight, stronger, and more flexible structures has received the utmost interest from many researchers. For this reason, piezoelectric materials, with their inherent electromechanical coupling, have been widely incorporated in the development of such structures to attenuate their vibrations. However, one of the main challenges is to find the optimal control and sensor-actuator placement. This paper presents an active vibration control for flexible structures, whereby a simply supported plate is taken as the benchmark model. A feedback controller with a collocated sensor-actuator configuration is used. Both disturbance and control signal acting on the plate is created by using piezoelectric (PZT) patches. The analytical model is derived based on the Euler-Bernoulli model. The Optimal location of the collocated sensor-actuator, as well as PID controller gains, are determined using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique, then compared with the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and enumerative method (EM). Optimization in this paper is based on minimizing frequency average energy. The optimal performance value of piezoelectric patch sensor-actuator position and PID controller gains are verified experimentally. It was found that PID controller gains and collocated sensor-actuator location optimizations using ACO, GA and enumerative methods give similar results, which implies the effectiveness of ACO as an optimization technique. More than 20 % of attenuation achieved using the available hardware setup.