Active Tendon Control of Vibration of Truss Structures: Theory and Experiments

This paper proposes a strategy for the active damping of cable structures, using active tendons. The first part of the paper summarizes the theoretical background: the control law is first briefly presented and the main results of an approximate linear theory which allows to predict the closed-loop poles with a root-locus technique are mentioned. The second part of the paper reports on experimental results obtained with two truss structures representative of future space applications. Finally, the behaviour of the control system for microvibrations is investigated.