Control Architectures for Metamaterials in Vibration Control

Metamaterials are artificial structures with properties that are rare or non-existent in nature. These properties are created by the geometry and interconnection of the metamaterial unit cells. In active metamaterials, sensors and actuators are embedded in each unit cell to achieve greater design freedom and tunability of properties after the fabrication. While active metamaterials have been used in vibration control applications, the influence of applied control architectures on damping performance has not been thoroughly studied yet. This paper discusses the relationship between suitable control architectures for increased damping in finite active metamaterials and the number of damped modes. A metamaterial beam consisting of links with measured and actuated joints is considered. Optimal controllers for each of the considered scenarios are designed in the modal domain using linear-quadratic regulator (LQR). We show that, when all modes of a structure should be damped, the optimal solution can be reduced to a decentralised controller. When modes in a smaller range of frequencies are targeted, distributed controllers show better performance. The results are confirmed with experiments.