SUMMARY
Light flexible structures are easily prone to vibrate due to external forces or due to forces generated in the inner structure. This situation is common in machinery or mechanical structures with rotational devices. The unwanted vibration of such structures can be compensated with the addition of piezoelectric actuators for active vibration control (AVC). The rejection of harmonic disturbances is frequently done with controllers based on the internal model principle. The goal of this research is to reduce the effect of harmonic disturbances with known (measured) time-varying frequencies acting on a system as well as to increase the damping of the system for the transient response (first mode of vibration). The experimental setup is made up of a slender aluminium flexible beam, a pair of piezoelectric actuators, an accelerometer and two DC motors, as well as the data acquisition and signal conditioning equipment. The harmonic disturbance is generated by DC motors. The control design utilizes an augmented description of the plant. The plant including the disturbance is modelled as a polytopic linear parameter-varying (pLPV) system. An observer-based gain-scheduling controller is calculated based on quadratic stability and the stability is guaranteed for the specified range of variation of the scheduling parameters, also restriction in the performance is introduced in the sense of the H2-norm. Experimental results show very good disturbance cancellation.