Monday  |  Salon 9  |  04:30 PM–04:50 PM

#12806, Smart Active Vibration Control System of a Rotary Structure using Piezoelectric Material

Vibration suppression has become one of the major issues in sensitive structures. The control of unwanted vibration of wind turbine blades plays a key role in ensuring wind turbines’ high efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and increasing structure’s lifetime. The active vibration control has been widely used in the field of vibration damping in rotary structures. In this paper, we propose an active vibration control system with piezoelectric patches as sensor and actuator. A linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control method is designed to alleviate vibrations and transverse deflections of a wind turbine blade. Implementation of controlling rules on a wind turbine blade is not feasible by using Finite Element (FE) commercial software due to its high computational cost. To simulate the implementation of active control rules on structures, we propose an innovative semi-analytical method to project an actual shape of a wind turbine blade to the same scale of an Euler-Bernoulli. This enables the derivation of an analytical solution for the wind turbine blade’s dynamic and vibration responses and applies the controlling rules to the wind turbine blade. Therefore, in the first step, this research aims to define a semi-analytical solution for a wind turbine blade to describe lateral blade deflections under external forces. In general, a semi-analytical solution technique is presented for solving linear partial differential equations. The most important advantage of semi-analytical methods over numerical methods is the tremendously shorter solving time. The second step presents an appropriate active control system to suppress unwanted transverse deflections of a wind turbine blade. Since using numeric methods are extremely time-consuming for applying controlling rules, the proposed semi-analytical method is utilized to apply controlling rules to a wind turbine blade. The method projects controlled transverse vibration of the actual shape of a wind turbine blade to an Euler-Bernoulli beam to achieve the performance of the proposed active control system. Findings show satisfactory correlations between the deflections obtained from the FE model and the counterparts from the proposed method. At the final step, the obtained results demonstrate the satisfying performance of the presented active piezoelectric-based vibration control system contains the LQR control method of a wind turbine blade under external loadings.

Ali Hashemi   Florida Atlantic University
Jinwoo Jang   Florida Atlantic University