Experimental studies on active vibration control of a smart composite beam using a PID controller

This paper presents experimental verification of the active vibration control of a smart cantilever composite beam using a PID controller. In order to prevent negative occurrences in the derivative and integral terms in a PID controller, first-order low-pass filters are implemented in the derivative action and in the feedback of the integral action. The proposed application setup consists of a composite cantilever beam with a fiber-reinforced piezoelectric actuator and strain gage sensors. The beam is modeled using a finite element method based on third-order shear deformation theory. The experiment considers vibration control under periodic excitation and an initial static deflection. A control algorithm was implemented on a PIC32MX440F256H microcontroller. Experimental results corresponding to the proposed PID controller are compared with corresponding results using proportional (P) control, proportional-integral (PI) control and proportional-derivative (PD) control. Experimental results indicate that the proposed PID controller provides 8.93% more damping compared to a PD controller, 14.41% more damping compared to a PI controller and 19.04% more damping compared to a P controller in the case of vibration under periodic excitation. In the case of free vibration control, the proposed PID controller shows better performance (settling time 1.2 s) compared to the PD controller (settling time 1.5 s) and PI controller (settling time 2.5 s).