Negative capacitance shunt damping system with optimized characteristics for use with piezoelectric transducers

For ecologic sustainability and decreasing reserves of fossile energy sources, fuel efficiency is a major concern especially for passenger aircraft. Therefore, lightweight structures made from carbon fiber plastics offer great potential. But when used for panel-like structures, they have the disadvantage of lower damping and coincidence frequencies compared to conventional differential metal constructions. Both aspects lead to an increased vibration level and by this a higher noise radiation. Because of this, special noise and vibration treatment is needed to ensure passenger cabin comfort. Besides passive damping and active structural acoustic control (ASAC), piezoelectric shunt damping is investigated. Due to its broadband performance, the negative capacitance shunt can be used for multimode systems with varying eigenfrequencies. These shunts are usually built with operational amplifiers and passive components as resistors and capacitors. This setup is sufficient for laboratory tests at low excitation levels. In fact, it is not capable of accessing the full voltage amplitude of common piezoelectric transducers, because most operational amplifiers only deliver +/- 15 V maximum output voltage. Therefore an improved setup is presented in this paper, which addresses the specific voltage requirements of a common piezoelectric transducer to achieve best performance. It comprises a tailored power source and an appropriate concept for the negative capacitance shunt hardware. This new hardware only uses standard operational amplifiers together with a high voltage power amplifier to cover the whole operating range of a piezoelectric transducer. A demonstrator board is developed and experimentally investigated at a test structure. Finally, the results are compared to a conventional setup.