Active vibration suppression with time delayed feedback

Various active vibration suppression techniques, which use feedback control, are implemented on the structures. In real application, time delay can not be avoided especially in the feedback line of the actively controlled systems. The effects of the delay have to be thoroughly understood from the perspective of system stability and the performance of the controlled system. Often used control laws are developed without taking the delay into account. They fulfill the design requirements when free of delay. As unavoidable delay appears, however the performance of the control changes. This work addresses the stability analysis of such dynamics as the control law remains unchanged but carries the effect of feedback time-delay, which can be varied. For this stability analysis along the delay axis, we follow up a recent methodology of the authors, the Direct Method (DM), which offers a unique and unprecedented treatment of a general class of linear time invariant time delayed systems (LTI-TDS). We discuss the underlying features and the highlights of the method briefly. Over an example vibration suppression setting we declare the stability intervals of the dynamics in time delay space using the DM. Having assessed the stability, we then look at the frequency response characteristics of the system as performance indications.