Active shape control of a cantilever by resistively interconnected piezoelectric patches

This paper is concerned with static and dynamic shape control of a laminated Bernoulli-Euler beam hosting a uniformly distributed array of resistively interconnected piezoelectric patches. We present an analytical one-dimensional model for a laminated piezoelectric beam with material discontinuities within the framework of Bernoulli-Euler and extent the model by a network of resistors which are connected to several piezoelectric patch actuators. The voltage of only one piezoelectric patch is prescribed: we answer the question how to design the interconnected resistive electric network in order to annihilate lateral vibrations of a cantilever. As a practical example, a cantilever with eight patch actuators under the influence of a tip-force is studied. It is found that the deflection at eight arbitrary points along the beam axis may be controlled independently, if the local action of the piezoelectric patches is equal in magnitude, but opposite in sign, to the external load. This is achieved by the proper design of the resistive network and a suitable choice of the input voltage signal. The validity of our method is exact in the static case for a Bernoulli-Euler beam, but it also gives satisfactory results at higher frequencies and for transient excitations. As long as a certain non-dimensional parameter, involving the number of the piezoelectric patches, the sum of the resistances in the electric network and the excitation frequency, is small, the proposed shape control method is approximately fulfilled for dynamic load excitations. We evaluate the feasibility of the proposed shape control method with a more refined model, by comparing the results of our one-dimensional calculations based on the extended Bernoulli-Euler equations to three-dimensional electromechanically coupled finite element results in ANSYS 12.0. The results with the simple Bernoulli-Euler model agree well with the three-dimensional finite element results.