Charge driven piezoelectric actuators for structural vibration control: issues and implementation

Piezoelectric actuators have been traditionally driven by voltage amplifiers. When driven at large voltages these actuators exhibit a significant amount of distortion, known as hysteresis, which may reduce the stability robustness of the system in feedback control applications. Electric charge is known to reduce the effects of this nonlinearity. To date little research has been done on the coupling between piezoelectric actuators and highly resonant structures when charge is used to drive the actuator. This arrangement was used in a control feedback scheme to reject disturbance vibrations acting on a cantilevered beam. During the analysis it is shown that the dynamics for the coupled 'piezoelectric-beam' system differs depending on whether voltage or charge is used to drive the piezoelectric actuator. Experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of using electrical charge are included.