Variations of hybrid damping

Damping is important to structures and can be achieved through the addition of viscoelastic materials (VEM). The damping of the VEM is enhanced if a constraining layer is attached to the VEM. If this constraining layer is active, the treatment is called active constrained layer damping (ACLD). In the last few years, ACLD has proven to be superior in vibration control to active or passive damping. The active element makes ACLD more effective than passive constrained layer damping. It also provides a fail-safe in case of breakdown of the active element that is not present for purely active control. It is shown that the control effort needed to damp vibration using ACLD can be significantly higher than purely active control. In order to combine the inherent damping of passive control with the effectiveness of the active element, this paper will explore different variations of active, passive and hybrid damping. Some of the variations include: passive constrained layer damping (PCLD) separate from active element but on the same side of beam, PCLD separate from active on the opposite side of the beam, and active element underneath PCLD. The discretized system equations will be obtained using assumed modes method and Lagrange's equation. The damping will be modeled using the Golla-Hughes-McTavish (GI-IM) method. The optimal placement and size of the active, passive, ACLD and hybrid treatments will be found using different schemes. The issue of overshoot and settling time of the output and control force using LQR will be addressed, as well as the control effort, passive and active vibration suppression, and LQR cost function It will be shown that the hybrid treatments are capable of greater vibration control for lower control effort for different optimization schemes.