Coupling analysis of a matched piezoelectric sensor and actuator pair for vibration control of a smart beam

This paper presents a theoretical and experimental study of the in-plane and out-of-plane coupling of a matched piezoelectric sensor/actuator pair bonded on a beam. Both the sensor and actuator are triangularly shaped polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) transducers and are intended to provide a compact sensor/actuator system for beam vibration control. The measured sensor-actuator frequency response function has shown an unpredicted increase in magnitude with frequency, which was found, to be due to in-plane vibration coupling. An analytical model has been developed to decompose the sensor-actuator response function into an in-plane contribution and an out-of-plane contribution. This in-plane coupling can limit the feedback control gains when a direct velocity feedback control is applied. A method called the jωs compensation method is proposed to identify the effect of the in-plane vibration coupling at low frequencies. Even after this compensation, however, there was unexpected strong out-of-plane coupling at even modes, which may have been caused by a lack of accuracy in the shaping of the PVDF sensor and actuator. Numerical simulations have confirmed the sensitivity of the matched sensor/actuator pair with shaping errors.