Active damping of vibrations of a cantilever beam by axial force control

In several fields, e.g. aerospace applications, robotics or the bladings of turbomachinery, the active damping of vibrations of slender beams which are subject to free bending vibrations becomes more and more important. In this contribution a slender cantilever beam loaded with a controlled force at its tip, which always points to the clamping point of the beam, is treated. The equations of motion are obtained using the Bernoulli-Euler beam theory and d'Alemberts principle. To introduce artificial damping to the lateral vibrations of the beam, the force at the tip of the beam has to be controlled in a proper way. Two different methods are compared. One concept is the closed-loop control of the force. In this case a nonlinear feedback control law is used, based on axial velocity feedback of the tip of the beam and a state-dependent amplification. By contrast, the concept of open-loop parametric control works without any feedback of the actual vibrations of the mechanical structure. This approach applies the force as harmonic function of time with constant amplitude and frequency. Numerical results are carried out to compare and to demonstrate the effectiveness of both methods.