Saturation Control for a Rotating Thin-walled Composite Beam Structure

A nonlinear saturation control method applied for reduction of oscillations of a rotating composite beam is presented in this paper. The flexible blade is treated as a thin-walled structure attached to a rigid hub driven by an external periodic torque. The beam model, derived in [1], [2], takes into account a strong coupling between the flexural and torsional deformations due to the assumed specific reinforcing fibers perimeter orientation. The proposed saturation control method is used for the reduction of coupled torsional-flexural beam oscillations around the third natural frequency of the system. It is shown that for assumed structural parameters it is possible to find gains of the controller which may essentially reduce vibrations of the beam near the resonance zone.