Active vibro-acoustic control with multiple local feedback loops

The active control of a structure in order to reduce its vibration or sound radiation, which may be termed active vibroacoustic control, has previously been achieved with multiple actuators and sensors and fully-coupled feedforward or feedback controllers. In this paper local velocity feedback using multiple miniature accelerometers will be investigated, together with either collocated force actuators or piezoceramic actuators placed under each sensor. With ideal force actuators, the plant response is passive for such an arrangement of collocated actuator/sensor pairs and so decentralised (local) feedback is guaranteed stable. This property is shown to extend to collocated velocity sensors and piezoceramic actuators over the bandwidth of interest and so multiple local feedback loops are also predicted to be stable. The performance of such a system is simulated in controlling the vibration and sound transmission through a thin plate, excited by an acoustic plane wave, with a 4 x 4 array of such actuator/sensor pairs, which are connected together with 16 local feedback control loops. Using force actuators, significant frequency-averaged reductions up to 1kHz in both the kinetic energy (28dB) and transmitted sound power (18dB) can be obtained with an appropriate feedback gain in each loop. These reductions are not so great with piezoelectric actuators (12dB and 9dB respectively) but their use allows the controller to be fully integrated in the structure.