Smart Damping Materials

Smart materials have long been heralded as the dawn of a new era in the construction of automotive vehicles, airplanes and other structures that have to meet ever more demanding performance requirements. This has largely not happened, at least not in the commercial arena. In this context dynamic behavior is one main design criterion for many kinds of load-carrying structures, as undesirable large-amplitude vibrations often impede the effective operation of various types of mechanical systems, including antennae, spacecrafts, rotorcrafts, automobiles, and sophisticated instruments. It is therefore desirable to introduce structural damping into a system to achieve a more satisfactory response and to delay fatigue damages.

The large instrumentation overhead of conventional vibration control can be significantly reduced by a new method that involves attaching an electrical shunt controller across the terminals of one piezoelectric transducer with the view to minimizing structural vibrations. This approach is referred to as piezoelectric shunt damping and is known as a simple, low-cost, lightweight and easy-to-implement method for vibration damping.

We are developing new adaptive resonant shunt circuits that can efficiently damp several structural modes and do not require power for operation.

                                                                                                                                       Set-up at EMPA Duebendorf