Active vibration control of a doubly-curved panel under pressurization

This study focuses on the control of doubly-curved panels which occur in aircrafts due to the deflection of fuselage panels during lateral pressure loading. This paper describes experimental work conducted toward the implementation of a feedback velocity control system on a pressurised panel of varying curvature in both the x and y directions. A thin rectangular aluminium panel was clamped to an airtight, rigid-walled enclosure and the curvature of the panel was varied through changing the interior static pressure. An electrodynamic proof-mass actuator and collocated accelerometer were implemented on the panel and in order to ensure stability and improve the performance of the feedback controller, a compensation filter was designed and added to the system. The attenuation in the structural response was investigated for increasing curvature. Current offline results show that effective control can be achieved for low levels of curvature. Furthermore, the compensated controller is robust to changes in curvature and the optimal gain of the compensated system remains more or less independent of the curvature level. However, increasing the curvature further causes modal clustering near the panel's ring frequency which reduces the performance of the controller.