Vibrations suppression of a Euler-Bernoulli beam in contact with a fluid using piezoelectric actuators

In this article the vibration suppression of a beam under heavy fluid loading will be addressed. The main novelty of this study is suppressing the beam vibrations in contact to the fluid utilizing piezoelectric sensors and actuators. The piezoelectric sensors and actuators are attached to the beam and utilized to suppress the beam vibrations. In this study, the fluid has a free surface which complicate handling the problem. We avoid discretizing the domains. The stabilizations objectives (for both beam vibrations and fluid coupled motion) will be accomplished utilizing only the piezoelectric actuators attached to the beam.

I. Introduction

There are a wide variety of fluid-structure problems; examples are suspension bridges, tall buildings, towers, oil platforms and power lines, airplane wings, submarines, tall buildings, solar panels, huge antennas, large flags etc., which all can be modelled as a beam like structure in contact with a fluid; see [1]–[3]. In almost all applications of beam-fluid interactions, vibration analysis is a basic part, because as mentioned above they are influenced by external effects and therefore maybe cause fluttering [4], [5]. Since these interactions arise in many applications, the problem of vibrating structures in contact with fluids has been thoroughly analyzed by many researchers [3], [6], [7].