Experimental robust control of structural acoustic radiation

This work addresses the design and application of robust controllers for st ructural acoustic control. Both simulation and experimental results are pre sented. H-infinity and mu-synthesis design methods were used to design feed back controllers which minimize power radiated from a panel while avoiding instability due to unmodeled dynamics. Specifically, high-order structural modes which couple strongly to the actuator-sensor path were poorly modeled . This model error was analytically, bounded with an uncertainty model whic h allowed controllers to be designed without artificial limits on control e ffort. It is found that robust control methods provide the control designer with physically meaningful parameters with which to tune control designs a nd can be very useful in determining limits of performance. However, experi mental results also showed poor robustness properties for control designs w ith ad-hoc uncertainty models. The importance of quantifying and bounding m odel errors is discussed.