Abstract
In actively controlled cantilevered pipes conveying fluid the critical flow velocity depends not only on the structural property of the pipe but also the feedback controller. In this report we discuss an integrated design of a cantilevered pipe conveying fluid to optimize both parameters in the pipe system and the controller in simultaneous manner. The pipe is composed by a beam with variable width and two pipes conveying fluid attached on both sides of the beam. The beam is divided into several parts and the width of each part can be independently adjusted so as to obtain the higher closed-loop critical flow velocity. This means that the resulted beam has a stepped form after the optimization The location and the number of the division of the beam are determined by the sign distribution of the sensitivity function of the critical flow velocity on the small width change of each divided part of the beam. The effectiveness of the proposed design methodology is justified by a simulation study.
