Vibration Control Using Heat Actuators

This paper focuses on theoretical investigation of active vibration control of a cantilever beam using heat actuation. The actuator is a thin metal bar rigidly bonded to the beam on one face and subject to heat input on the opposite face. The actuator then works like a piezoelectric actuator, and expands and contracts in response to applied heat. We assume that the actuator is insulated so that no heat is transferred to the beam, ensuring that the heat does not alter the beam’s thermal state. To avoid necessity of cooling, we consider two actuators working together at the same span-wise location, one on the upper and one on the lower face of the beam. Then, the beam can be bent up and down by applying heat to the lower and upper actuators, respectively. The governing equations are partial differential equations for one-dimensional heat conduction of the actuators and the bending vibration of the beam with attached actuators. For an approximate solution, Rayleigh-Ritz method replaces the partial differential equations with a system of ordinary differential equations. A control model is obtained from a low-dimensional representation of the system, and used to design feedback control and observer by means of LQR and Kalman-Bucy filtering techniques. The control signal obtained is introduced into the plant model, a high-dimensional representation of the system, to mimic the true system as closely as possible. In a numerical application, the response of the beam to an initial excitation is simulated, which demonstrates that the heat actuators are in fact effective in active vibration control of the beam.

Characteristics of pulsed plasma synthetic jet and its control effect on supersonic flow

The plasma synthetic jet is a novel flow control approach which is currently being studied. In this paper its characteristic and control effect on supersonic flow is investigated both experimentally and numerically. In the experiment, the formation of plasma synthetic jet and its propagation velocity in quiescent air are recorded and calculated with time resolved schlieren method. The jet velocity is up to 100 m/s and no remarkable difference has been found after changing discharge parameters. When applied in Mach 2 supersonic flow, an obvious shockwave can be observed. In the modeling of electrical heating, the arc domain is not defined as an initial condition with fixed temperature or pressure, but a source term with time-varying input power density, which is expected to better describe the influence of heating process. Velocity variation with different heating efficiencies is presented and discussed and a peak velocity of 850 m/s is achieved in still air with heating power density of 5.0 · 1012W/m3. For more details on the interaction between plasma synthetic jet and supersonic flow, the plasma synthetic jet induced shockwave and the disturbances in the boundary layer are numerically researched. All the results have demonstrated the control authority of plasma synthetic jet onto supersonic flow.