Vibration Control Design for a Plate Structure with Electrorheological ATVA Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy System

This study presents vibration control using actively tunable vibration absorbers (ATVA) to suppress vibration of a thin plate. The ATVA is made of a sandwich hollow structure embedded with electrorheological fluid (ERF). ERF is considered to be one of the most important smart fluids and it is suitable to be embedded in a smart structure due to its controllable rheological property. ERF’s apparent viscosity can be controlled in response to the electric field and the change is reversible in 10 microseconds. Therefore, the physical properties of the ERF-embedded smart structure, such as the stiffness and damping coefficient, can be changed in response to the applied electric field. A mathematical model is difficult to be obtained to describe the exact characteristics of the ERF embedded ATVA because of the nonlinearity of ERF’s viscosity. Therefore, a fuzzy modeling and experimental validations of ERF-based ATVA from stationary random vibrations of thin plates are presented in this study. Because Type-2 fuzzy sets generalize Type-1 fuzzy sets so that more modeling uncertainties can be handled, a semi-active vibration controller is proposed based on Type-2 fuzzy sets. To investigate the different performances by using different types of fuzzy controllers, the experimental measurements employing both type-1 fuzzy and interval type-2 fuzzy controllers are implemented by the Compact RIO embedded system. The fuzzy modeling framework and solution methods presented in this work can be used for design, performance analysis, and optimization of ATVA from varying harmonic vibration of thin plates.