Mitigation of nonlinear vibrations with a digital piezoelectric tuned vibration absorber

This work presents an experimental realization of a digital piezoelectric vibration absorber. A piezoelectric transducer coupled to a structure may convert a part of its mechanical energy into electrical energy. This energy can then be dissipated through an impedance, often called shunt circuit. Depending on the complexity of the circuit and on the required parameters for its physical constituents, its practical realization may be uneasy. A solution to circumvent these issues altogether is to use a digital impedance. Owing to the flexibility offered by the digital processing unit, almost any impedance can be synthesized, including nonlinear ones with arbitrary functional forms. In this work, the digital impedance is used to realize a linear or nonlinear piezoelectric tuned vibration absorber to mitigate the resonance of a nonlinear structure. The superior performance of the nonlinear absorber over its linear counterpart is demonstrated. Various nonlinear functional forms are also tested in the absorber and illustrate the relevance of a principle of similarity (i.e. the same functional form should be used in the absorber as that in the host structure) for performance.