Active Stiffeners for Vibration Control of a Circular Plate Structure: Analytical and Experimental Investigations

Space-based adaptive optic systems have gained considerable attention within the past couple of decades. Achieving the increasingly stringent performance requirements for these systems is greatly hindered by strict weight restrictions, size limitations, and subjected hostile environments. There has been considerable attention in developing lightweight adaptive optics where piezoelectric sheet actuators are attached on the back of optical mirrors to achieve a high precision surface shape with minimum additional weight. Vibration control of such large flexible space structures is continually challenging to engineers due to the large number of actuators and sensors and the large number of vibration modes within the operational bandwidth. For these structures, any disturbed modes are likely to remain vibrating for an extended period of time due to the small amount of damping available. As a result, controller spillover should be minimized as much as possible to avoid exciting the residual modes. In recent investigations of circular plate shape control by [Philen and Wang, Int. Soc. Opt. Eng. 4327, pp. 709–719]. It was demonstrated that directional decoupling of the two-dimensional actuator (meaning that the actuation in one of the two directions is eliminated) improves the system performance when correcting for the lower order Zernike static deformations. This directional decoupling effect can be achieved through an active stiffener (AS) design. In this research, analytical and experimental efforts are carried out to examine the effect of the active stiffener actuators in reducing the controller spillover through the stiffeners’ decoupling characteristics. It is shown that significant reductions in controller spillover can be achieved in systems using the active stiffener actuators when compared to systems having direct attached (DA) actuators, thus resulting in improved vibration control performance. The experimental results verify the analytical predictions and clearly demonstrate the merit of the active stiffener concept.