Comprehensive assessment of semi-active vibration suppression including energy analysis

This paper presents an extensive investigation on the LR-switching method (also called the energy-recycling semi-active method). Compared with the energy-dissipative R-switching method, the LR-switching method has been shown to have significantly better vibration suppression performance. However certain essential issues affecting a system employing the LR-switching method remained to, be dealt with. In particular we had to clarify its vibration suppression mechanism from the viewpoint of mechanical and electrical energy exchange. Second, the robustness of the method against model errors and control time delays had to be verified. The experiments and numerical simulations that we conducted on a 10-bay truss structure demonstrate that the LR-switching method outperforms other suppression methods under sinusoidal and random excitations, which are more common in real systems and more difficult to deal with than transient vibrations. This paper provides fundamental insights on the LR-switching method and gives the method a guarantee for actual applications.