A Self-Sensing Piezoelectric Actuator for Collocated Control

A technique has been developed which allows a single piece of piezoelec tric material to concurrently sense and actuate in a closed loop system. The motivation behind the technique is that such a self-sensing actuator will be truly collocated and has applications in active and intelligent structures, such as vibration suppression. A theoreti cal basis for the self-sensing actuator is given in terms of the electromechanical consti tutive equations for a piezoelectric material. In a practical implementation of the self- sensing actuator an electrical bridge circuit is used to measure strain. The bridge circuit is capable of measuring either strain or time rate of strain in the actuator. The usefulness of the proposed device was experimentally verified by actively damping the vibration in a cantilever beam. A single piezoceramic element bonded to the base of the beam functioned both as a distributed moment actuator and strain sensor. Using a rate feedback control law, the first mode of vibration was suppressed, reducing the settling from 35 seconds to 2.5 seconds. Using a positive position feedback law the first two modes of vibration were suppressed; the first mode settling time was reduced from 35 to 0.3 sec onds and the second mode settling time was reduced from 7 seconds to 0.9 seconds.