Active Approaches to Vibration Absorption through Antiresonance Assignment: A Comparative Study

Vibration absorption is a core research topic in structural dynamics and the mechanics of machines, and antiresonance assignment is an effective solution to such a problem in the presence of harmonic excitation forces. Due to recent developments in the theory of feedback control systems, the use of active control approaches to antiresonance assignment has been recently gaining more attention in the literature. Therefore, several methods exploiting state feedback or output feedback have been proposed in recent years. These techniques that just rely on servo-controlled actuators are becoming an interesting alternative to active approaches that emulate the well-known Tuned Mass Damper in an active (or semi-active) framework. This paper reviews and compares the most important approaches, with a greater focus on the methods exploiting the concept of control theory without adding new degrees of freedom in the system. The theoretical results, with the underlying theory, are discussed to highlight the key features of each assignment techniques. Several numerical examples where different techniques are applied and compared, also providing some analysis usually neglected in the literature, enrich the paper and demonstrate the key concepts.