Control Concepts for a Vibration Absorber With an Adaptive Joint Connection

The use of absorbers to reduce vibrations of machines is common in industry and can be found in various applications. In most cases passive absorbers are used to cancel one particular eigenfrequency. The disadvantage of this solution is that due to the introduction of an additional degree-of-freedom two resonance peaks occur next to the absorbed eigenfrequency. Given the case that the machine operates in a wider frequency band these two eigenfrequencies could be excited and feature similarly high amplitudes. To address this concern, in the present case an adaptive absorber is used, which is able to adjust its eigenfrequency to the actually excited frequency. Therefore, the anti-resonance can be shifted such that a full cancellation of the resonance is possible. The absorber consists of a mass and two springs. One spring is fixed to the mass permanently and the second can be coupled to the system by an adaptive joint connection. The normal force in the frictional contact serves as control variable to achieve adaptivity of the dynamic eigenfrequency of the absorber. Two control concepts are presented. Both concepts include isolated curves characterizing the nonlinear relation between the dynamic stiffness and the related normal force based on simulations using the Harmonic Balance Method. Due to the isolation of the nonlinearity, linear control concepts like LQR can be applied, which is done in the present case. Furthermore, a direct control of the eigenfrequency is done. The adaptive absorber is applied to a simplified machine tool carriage.