The optimal design of piezoelectric actuators for plate vibroacoustic control using genetic algorithms with immune diversity

This paper studies the optimal design of piezoelectric actuators for suppressing noise transmission of a vibration plate. The optimal placement of the actuators to reduce the global noise levels is still a significant design problem, especially placement limited to discrete locations. With the increase of the alternative locations and number of actuators, a large number of placement possibilities exist. These multi-dimensional nonlinear problems are very difficult for traditional optimization methods. In this paper, genetic algorithms have introduced to solve the problem of optimal discrete placement of piezoelectric patches. In order to improve the diversity of the population, a new selection factor is presented that is based on immune diversity, which is dependent on the string denseness and its function value. The survivor probability of the string with higher denseness will be reduced. Several cases for a simple supported plate under different load conditions show that the improved algorithms are efficient.