A Control Strategy of Actively Actuated Eccentric Mass System for Imbalance Rotor Vibration

This paper explores the new control strategy of an actively actuated eccentric mass system (AAEMS) for cancelling the rotor imbalance vibration. The AAEMS consists of an eccentric mass with an actuator that actively moves around the circular guided track attached to the rotating rotor thus can generate an effective centrifugal force perpendicular to any tangential direction of the guided circular trajectory. Therefore, once the magnitude and angular position of the inherited static imbalance of the rotor are identified, this actively controlled system can be dispatched to the target angular position(s) where the effective centrifugal force due to rotor imbalance is completely or partially removed. This novel device is currently available and widely used in the vibration isolation problem. However, the study of its control strategy is quite limited, thus, herein, we proposed a new possible control technique, guaranteeing both the robust vibration isolation performance and less control power consumption. To meet such needs, three primary functions of AAEMS are addressed here. First, two (Extended) Kalman filters were employed to sequentially estimate the unknown imbalance of the rotor and the unknown coulomb friction induced between the contact surface of the circular track and the counter-contacted parts of AAEMS. Second, the position control of the AAEMS is achieved by a linear quadratic regulator (LQR)-based optimal control law, simultaneously minimizing the imbalance vibration of the rotor as well as the power consumption of its own actuator. Third, for the situation where the estimation and control errors are presented, thus causing the failure to an acceptable threshold for imbalance vibration, the trial-error-based fine-tuning angular position control was proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy was evaluated via the simulations and this study shows the practical potential for addressing the AAEMS-based imbalance vibration elimination.