Vibration mitigation of bladed structures using piezoelectric digital vibration absorbers

This work presents a novel vibration damping approach for bladed structures. Piezoelectric transducers bonded to a structure can be used simultaneously as actuators and sensors in order to mitigate the vibrations of their host. This can be achieved by connecting a transducer to a digital vibration absorber composed of a voltage sensor, a digital processing unit and a current injector. The digital vibration absorber thereby emulates a piezoelectric shunt. In this study, this technique is applied to bladed structures featuring small modal damping and closely-spaced resonance frequencies grouped in mode families. A strategy exploiting the high modal density is presented. Effective vibration mitigation is experimentally demonstrated on multiple mode families simultaneously.