A nonlinear piezoelectric shunt absorber with 2:1 internal resonance: experimental proof of concept

An experimental proof of concept of a new semi-passive nonlinear piezoelectric shunt absorber, introduced theoretically in a companion article, is presented in this work. This absorber is obtained by connecting, through a piezoelectric transducer, an elastic structure to a resonant circuit that includes a quadratic nonlinearity. This nonlinearity is obtained by including in the circuit a voltage source proportional to the square of the voltage across the piezoelectric transducer, thanks to an analog multiplier circuit. Then, by tuning the electric resonance of the circuit to half the value of one of the resonances of the elastic structure, a two-to-one internal resonance is at hand. As a result, a strong energy transfer occurs from the mechanical mode to be attenuated to the electrical mode of the shunt, leading to two essential features: a nonlinear antiresonance in place of the mechanical resonance and an amplitude saturation. Namely, the amplitude of the elastic structure oscillations at the antiresonance becomes, above a given threshold, independent of the forcing level, contrary to a classical linear resonant shunt. This paper presents the experimental setup, the designed nonlinear shunt circuit and the main experimental results.