IMPLEMENTATION OF UNIFORM DAMPING CONTROL BY THE BLOCK-INDEPENDENT CONTROL METHOD

The use of block-independent control is investigated for active dampin g of a flexible structure. The control gains are designed to approxima te Uniform Damping Control, in which the target modal decay rates are equivalent. Modal estimation is performed using a Kalman filter. React ion wheels are used to apply control torques and are found to possess significant dynamics in the controller frequency bandwidth. To reduce the effect of the actuator dynamics, the reaction wheels are targeted to control blocks of modes within the controller bandwidth, thereby pr oviding approximate block-independent control. Analytical and experime ntal results indicate that the effect of modal coupling is small for l ow-to-medium authority block-independent control.