A Simple Closed-Loop Active Control of Electrodynamic Shakers by Acceleration Power Spectral Density for Environmental Vibration Tests

This work presents the main results of a simple closed-loop active control for an electrodynamic shaker in order to generate acceleration Power Spectral Densities (PSD) according to prescribed Standards used in environmental vibration tests. The main idea is to start generating acceleration pseudo-signals obeying the prescribed Power Spectral Density and then to acquire acceleration data from the electrodynamic shaker’s table behaviour. So the Power Spectral Density of the acquired acceleration is computed and compared with the required PSD and then the time-varying pseudo-acceleration is updated to reflect this corrected PSD. It was noticed that for piecewise narrow bands frequencies, the electrodynamic shaker acceleration behaves near linearly, both in frequency and voltage, for the input signals. A code in AgilentVee 7.5 software to acquire, send and process signals for the active control in a closed-loop scheme was developed. The used A/D D/A hardware was a single PC sound card with specific characteristics. The control could be accomplished sending and acquiring at the same time with a range of input/output of ±1.5 V with 16 bits of resolution, at 48 kHz and assistance of an external sound amplifier.