Passive piezoelectric subordinate oscillator arrays

• Published in: Smart materials and structures Vol. 28; no. 8; pp. 85046 - 85065
• Main Authors: Paruchuri, Sai Tej, Sterling, John, Malladi, Vijaya V N Sriram, Kurdila, Andrew, Vignola, Joseph, Tarazaga, Pablo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 01.08.2019
• Subjects: broadband flat vibration attenuation; performance recovery; piezoelectric subordinate oscillator arrays; shunt tuning
• ISSN: 0964-1726; 1361-665X
• DOI: 10.1088/1361-665X/ab2f5a

Subordinate oscillator arrays (SOAs) attached to a host structure have been shown to achieve flat attenuation of the frequency response over a band around a target natural frequency of the host. Due to their sensitivity to disorders that can arise from sources such as fabrication errors, as well as uncertainties in their structural properties or that of the host, SOAs can be challenging to implement in some applications. To overcome this shortcoming, piezoelectric subordinate oscillator arrays (PSOAs) are studied in this paper. This paper models PSOAs using variational principles to facilitate the analysis and development of design strategies. A closed-form expression for the frequency response function of the host structure is then used to design the PSOAs with and without uncertainties. This paper shows that the flat attenuation over a frequency band around a harmonic of the host can be achieved by assigning a distribution to the mechanical, electrical, or electromechanical properties of the PSOAs. For instance, it is shown that choosing a distribution of capacitive shunt circuits can achieve essentially the same qualitatively flat attenuation as that of classical SOAs. In this sense, the approach in this paper generalizes the results attained for conventional SOAs. Finally, the paper investigates the robustness of PSOAs, that is, their relative insensitivity to types of uncertainties. It is shown that PSOAs afford the chance to ameliorate some types of sensitivities that prove problematic for SOAs that are purely mechanical in nature. The notion of performance recovery is introduced; this measure quantifies how much attenuation loss due to uncertainty in an initial SOA or PSOA design can be recovered by modification of the electrical properties alone.