Active vibration control of a gyroscopic rotor using experimental modal analysis

A gyroscopic rotor exposed to unbalance is studied and controlled with an active piezoelectrical bearing. A model is required in order to design a suited controller. Due to the lack of related publications utilizing piezoelectrical bearings and obtaining a modal model purely exploiting experimental modal analysis, this paper reveals a method to receive a modal model of a gyroscopic rotor system with an active piezoelectrical bearing. The properties of the retrieved model are then incorporated into the design of an originally model-free control approach for unbalance vibration elimination, which consists of a simple feedback control and an adaptive feedforward control. After the discussion on the limitations of the model-free control, a modified controller using the priorly identified modal model is implemented on an elementary rotor test-rig comparing its performance to the original model-free controller.