Feedback control design for intelligent structures with closely-spaced eigenvalues

Large space structures may have resonant low eigenvalues and often these appear with closely-spaced natural frequencies. Owing to the coupling among modes with closely-spaced natural frequencies, each eigenvector corresponding to closely-spaced eigenvalues is ill-conditioned that may cause structural instability. The subspace to an invariant subspace corresponding to closely-spaced eigenvalues is well-conditioned, so a method is presented to design the feedback control law of intelligent structures with closely-spaced eigenvalues in this paper. The main steps are as follows: firstly, the system with closely-spaced eigenvalues is transformed into that with repeated eigenvalues by the spectral decomposition method; secondly, the computation for the linear combination of eigenvectors corresponding to repeated eigenvalues is obtained; thirdly, the feedback control law is designed on the basis of the system with repeated eigenvalues; fourthly, the system with closely-spaced eigenvalues is regarded as perturbed system on the basis of the system with repeated eigenvalues; finally, the feedback control law is applied to the original system, the first order perturbations of eigenvalues are discussed when the parameter modifications of the system are introduced. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the application of the present method.