Active damping of spacecraft structural appendage vibrations

Active Isolation and Damping of Vibrations via Stewart Platform

Acknowledgements In the beginning, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor professor André Preumont, the head of the Active Structures Laboratory for his patience, wise advices, brilliant ideas and suggestions and for his strong insistance and high pressure to achieve better work. I would like to thank my colleagues: Frédéric Bossens for putting my feet on the right way, M...

Modeling for Structural Vibrations: FEM Models, Damping, Similarity Laws

Stiff and Soft Stewart Platforms for Active Damping and Active Isolation of Vibrations

As future astronomic missions will require more and more stringent resolution requirements, the high demand for an environment clean of vibrations and disturbance appears. This also leads to the need for high precision steering devices for fine pointing of sensitive optics with the highest possible accuracy. Several methods exist to reduce vibration levels: the first consists in isolating the s...

Passive Damping of Spacecraft Sandwich Panels

For reusable and expendable launch vehicles as well as for other spacecraft structural vibration loads are safety critical design drivers impacting mass and lifetime. Here, the improvement of reliability and safety, the reduction of mass, the extension of service life, as well as the reduction of cost for manufacturing are desired. Spacecraft structural design in general is a compromise between...

Active Vibration Suppression of a Nonlinear Flexible Spacecraft

In this article, the issue of attitude control and active vibration suppression of a nonlinear flexible spacecraft is assessed through piezoelectric patches as actuator and sensors. Two controller loops are applied: the inner loop, to make the panel vibration damped through piezoelectric patches; and the outer loop, to perform spacecraft maneuver using the reaction wheel acting on the hub. An o...