On the principle of impulse damper: A concept derived from impact damper

The present article discusses a new principle of active vibration control of lightly damped flexible structural members. The basic scheme mimics the working principle of impact dampers. Control efforts are in the form of impulses generated by expanding and contracting a mass loaded lead zirconium titanate (PZT) stack actuator at suitable values of the states of the system. Efficacy of the damper is demonstrated in mitigating free vibration, forced vibration and self-excited vibration of a single-degree-of-freedom primary system. Effects of various parameters are studied to reveal the existence of optimum control parameters in controlling free vibration. Finally, a dynamic control law is proposed to generate the hysteretic control commands for expanding and contracting the actuator. The hysteretic part of the control command is generated by a first-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE). The proposed scheme is thought to be useful for controlling vibrations of a wide class of systems ranging from macro- to microscale applications like microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microrobots, and other micromachines, etc. If adaptively used, the damper can perform optimally without requiring an explicit mathematical model of the system and the global dynamic information thereof.