Shunt Damping Vibration Control Technology: A Review

Smart materials and structures have attracted a significant amount of attention for their vibration control potential in engineering applications. Compared to the traditional active technique, shunt damping utilizes an external circuit across the terminals of smart structure based transducers to realize vibration control. Transducers can simultaneously serve as an actuator and a sensor. Such unique advantage offers a great potential for designing sensorless devices to be used in structural vibration control and reduction engineering. The present literature combines piezoelectric shunt damping (PSD) and electromagnetic shunt damping (EMSD), establishes a unified governing equation of PSD and EMSD, and reports the unique vibration control performance of these shunts. The schematic of shunt circuits is given and demonstrated, and some common control principles and equations of these shunts are summarized. Finally, challenges and perspective of the shunt damping technology are discussed, and suggestions made based on the knowledge and experience of the authors.