Experimental investigation of active vibration control using neural networks and piezoelectric actuators

The use of neural networks for identification and control of smart structures is investigated experimentally. Piezoelectric actuators are employed to suppress the vibrations of a cantilevered plate subject to impulse. sine wave and band-limited white noise disturbances. The neural networks used are multilayer perceptrons trained with error backpropagation. Validation studies show that the identifier predicts the system dynamics accurately. The controller is trained adaptively with the help of the neural identifier. Experimental results demonstrate excellent closed-loop performance and robustness of the neurocontroller.