Cost-performance enhancement of an active wheel damper for flexible structures by using the dynamic quantizer

Abstract

This study develops a rotary-type active vibration control device (Active Wheel Damper, AWD) using a fly-wheel to control vibrations in flexible structures. The AWD achieves lightweight and higher inertia by the fly-wheel, and can be mounted on the flexible structure easily. In addition, the AWD can realize sky-hook controller easily because it can measure the absolute angular velocity of the flexible structure by the gyro sensor. So, the AWD uses Sky-hook With Disturbance Cancellation (SWDC) control, which is combined controller of a sky-hook control and a disturbance cancellation control with very high vibration suppression potential. However, control performance depends on the resolutions of sensors (Analog-Digital converters) and controller outputs (Digital-Analog converters), and higher cost is necessary for using the higher resolution sensors and controllers. In general, control performance deteriorates due to using low cost instruments with low resolutions. This paper investigates a method for cost-performance improvement of the AWD by using the dynamic quantizer (DQ) for practical use. So this study applies the dynamic quantizer into the SWDC controller of the AWD to prevent performance deterioration due to using the sensor and controllers with low resolutions. In addition, the parameters of the dynamic quantizer is optimized by Genetic Algorithm (GA) to achieve higher control performance under the condition using low resolution instruments. Usefulness and the performance of the proposed method are shown by numerical simulations.