EFFECTIVE SELECTION OF PIEZOCERAMIC ACTUATORS FOR AN EXPERIMENTAL FLEXIBLE WING

The effectiveness of individual or subsets of piezoceramic actuators a re investigated in terms of their contributions to the joint controlla bility and observability for a fixed set of sensors. The method used i s based on the decomposition of the Hankel singular values in terms of individual sensor and actuator combinations for flexible structures, The degree of participation of the individual structural modes in the butter control problem is used to weigh the actuator selection metric in the feedback loop. Simulation results based on H-2 and H-infinity c ontrol law designs indicate that closed loop performance can be improv ed significantly and the performance improvement is independent of the particular type of control law.