Acceleration sensors based modal identification and active vibration control of flexible smart cantilever plate

Some flexible appendages of spacecrafts, such as solar panels, are cantilever plate structures. Thus, vibration problem is unavoidable when there is slewing maneuver or external disturbance excitation. Vibration of such cantilever plate structures includes coupled bending and torsional motion. Furthermore, the low amplitude vibration near the equilibrium point is very difficult to be quickly suppressed due to nonlinear factors of the hardware in the system, which is harmful to stability and attitude control accuracy. To solve these problems, acceleration sensor-based modal identification and active vibration control methods are presented for the first two bending and the first two torsional modes vibration of the cantilever plate. Optimal placements of three acceleration sensors and PZT patches actuators are performed to decouple the bending and torsional vibration of such cantilever plate for sensing and actuating, and identifications are achieved by experiments. A nonlinear control method is presented to suppress both high and low amplitude vibrations of flexible smart cantilever plate significantly. Experimental comparison researches are conducted by using acceleration proportional feedback and the presented nonlinear control algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that the presented acceleration sensor-based methods can suppress the vibration of cantilever plate effectively.