Tuning Method of Fractional Order Controllers for Vibration Suppression in Smart Structures

Vibration suppression is a major problem in various domains, with applications ranging from medical devices to aerospace engineering. Several methods for suppressing vibrations have been proposed, but very few address this issue from the fractional calculus perspective. The emerging new fractional order controllers have the ability to meet more design specifications at the same time, behaving robustly against modeling uncertainties, external disturbances, etc. In this paper, a new tuning method for fractional order PD mu controller is proposed in which the design directly addresses the problem of suppressing resonance frequency vibrations. The case study consists in an unloaded smart beam. The simulation results, considering an additional situation of the loaded smart beam, show that the proposed method is simple and leads to a robust closed loop behavior.