Active vibration control and experimental investigations of the composite parabolic shell with variable cross-section under thermal load

The accurate dynamic equation of the parabolic shell with variable cross-section is developed in this paper. The geometric nonlinearity is used to amend the expression of the strain. Considering the large overall motion and solar heat flux, the flexible deformations and freedom vibrations of the parabolic shell are analyzed by the proposed method. Meanwhile, the strain rate feedback control law with piezoelectric layer is presented to improve the dynamic performance of the parabolic shell during the motion process. The experiments with parabolic shell are studied to verify the correctness of the proposed method and control strategy. It is found that the results obtained by the proposed method agree very well with the experiments. Furthermore, the numerical results show that high-frequency vibration and flexible deformation can be effectively improved by the Macro Fiber Composite (MFC). And the optimized controller gain coefficient is also discussed at the end of this paper. This paper demonstrates the importance of the piezoelectric layer for the improvement of the dynamic response of flexible parts.