Implementing Active Force Control to Reduce Vibration of a Short Length Drive Shaft

Abstract

Vibration is a physical phenomenon involving repeated oscillatory movements or fluctuations at certain frequency and typically undesirable in many applications since it may cause undue failure or damage to the system. In this paper, the vibration of a three degree-of-freedom (DOF) model representing a short length drive shaft has been effectively and robustly suppressed through the implementation of a novel Active Force Control (AFC) used in conjunction with a classic proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. The shaft vibration caused by its support and constraint during its operation was simulated using MATLAB and Simulink considering a number of operating and loading conditions. The results proved that when a pure PID controller was implemented, the vibration is indeed reduced but at the expense of longer execution time and producing noticeable frequency oscillation with slight offset. On the other hand, when the AFC loop was engaged by adding it directly in series with the PID controller (PID+AFC) to produce a 2 DOF controller without any need to further tune the PID controller gains, the vibration is significantly reduced with the amplitude hovering a zero datum without any offset and yielding an extremely low frequency trending.