Smart Plates and Shells

Smart structures for vibration control of flexible space structures have attracted considerable amount of research in recent years. The development of smart structures with piezoelectric sensor/actuators (S/As) offers great potential for use in advanced aerospace, nuclear and automotive structural applications. The smart structure, which contains the main structure and the distributed piezoelectric S/As, can sense the excitations induced by its environment and can also generate control forces to either eliminate the undesirable effects ormay be traced to Bailey and to enhance the desirable effects. Application of smart structures to vibration control may be traced to Bailey and Hubbard (1985), who used polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) as a distributed actuator on a cantilever beam to control its vibration. Subsequently, the modeling, basic equations, control laws, FE analysis methods, and experiments for smart structures have been investigated by several other researchers such as Wang and Rogers (1991), Chandrashekara and Agarwal (1993) and Song et al. (2002).