Decentralised active vibration control using a remote sensing strategy

In many applications it is desirable to use a decentralised control strategy, in which multiple sensor-actuator pairs are utilised to control the response of a structure. This avoids the need for connections between multiple sensors and actuators and allows the system to be easily scaled to different applications. However, because the individual control loops, consisting of a single sensor-actuator pair, only have a direct measurement of the local vibration signal it is not straightforward to guarantee global reduction of the kinetic energy of the structure. In this paper a novel decentralised control strategy is proposed in which the vibration at remote locations is estimated utilising the local error sensor signal and the local control loop is then adapted to minimise the sum of both the squared local and the estimated remote error signals. When multiple loops are employed, it is also necessary for each local control loop to predict the global effect of the remote control signals and use this information in the adaptation of the local control loop. This paper describes the proposed control strategy, including the calibration of the algorithm and the estimation of the error and control signals. The proposed control strategy is evaluated through simulation of an acoustically excited flat panel and its performance is compared to both standard centralised and decentralised control strategies.