Damping Position-dependent Parasitic Vibrations

Parasitic resonances are often limiting the performance of precision machinery.<br/>The associated resonance frequency and mode shape may change over the workspace of the machine, making robust suppression or damping of these parasitic resonances a non-trivial task. This article outlines an active damping method for the suppression of position-dependent parasitic resonances through small integrated piezoelectric sensors and actuators, and shows its application to a flexure mechanism. Applying a resonant control technique, the limited actuation budget is efficiently used. A scheduling approach is followed to deal with the position-dependent behaviour. This leads to a significant improvement of the disturbance sensitivity of the flexure-based manipulator.