Damping Control of Sloshing in Liquid Container in Cart With Active Vibration Reducer: The Case of a Curved Path on a Horizontal Plane

This paper proposes a control system for an active vibration reducer to damp sloshing in a liquid container transferred by a cart. The active vibration reducer is installed on the cart, and has a parallel linkage mechanism with six degrees of freedom. It tilts to horizontally shift the liquid container to damp the sloshing generated as the container is moved along a path. Only (1, 1)-mode sloshing is modeled as the dominant mode in the control system. The reducer is controlled by a frequency-dependent optimal servo system adapted to prevent the control system from destabilizing due to the unmodeled sloshing mode. The control gain in the optimal servo system is determined using a genetic algorithm (GA), where the amplitude of sloshing is considered for the fitness of the GA. The cart was driven along a curved path on a horizontal plane in an experiment to test the proposed control system, and exhibited satisfactory damping performance.