Mimicking the cochlear amplifier in a cantilever beam using nonlinear velocity feedback control

The mammalian cochlea exhibits a nonlinear amplification which allows mammals to detect a large range of sound pressure levels while maintaining high frequency sensitivity. This work seeks to mimic the cochlea's nonlinear amplification in a mechanical system. A nonlinear, velocity-based feedback control law is applied to a cantilever beam with piezoelectric actuators. The control law reduces the linear viscous damping of the system while introducing a cubic damping term. The result is a system which is positioned close to a Hopf bifurcation. Modelling and experimental results show that the beam with this control law undergoes a one-third amplitude scaling near the resonance frequency and an amplitude-dependent bandwidth. Both behaviors are characteristic of data obtained from the mammalian cochlea. This work could provide insight on the biological cochlea while producing bio-inspired sensors with a large dynamic range and sharp frequency sensitivity.