Smart Inductive Arrays to Efficiently Calm Structural Vibrations

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Continuously increasing energy costs and tightening legal regulations require to increase the efficiency of all kinds of machinery. Consequently, structures are more and more built under lightweight aspects reducing influences, which damp oscillations. The effect of this trend is an increased sensitivity against vibrational excitation. Therefore, it is vital to reduce oscillations in mechanical structures effectively, tightly focused and situation adaptive without affecting the functionality or the efficiency of the system. Particularly challenging are spatially extended structures – as for example panels, vehicle body parts, or wings of airplanes. Such structures exhibit a lot of resonance frequencies, are prone to excessively radiate noise and cannot be calmed efficiently by localized measures. From this point of view, distributed damping devices appear to be a natural choice. However, commonly applied insulation panels turn out to be of little effect and do not allow for a differentiated design of the damping mechanisms.Motivated by this observation, it is the main goal of this proposal to develop distributed inductive damping elements (“smart arrays”) incorporating intelligent and adaptive capabilities. Electromagnetic concepts provide a promising basis in this context and can be easily applied to extended structures. Compared to commonly applied, strongly localized measures, such approaches offer various advantages: besides avoiding strong localization of dissipation power, they can be used to damp individual vibration modes, or affect the considered structure at a desired location. Furthermore, combining and interconnecting different elements and tailoring physical non-linearities, situation adaptive configurations can be created. As a further point it is to be expected, that induction-based modules profit from distributed configurations: as lower local dissipation power requires lower flux densities, less material is necessary, and the overall weight of the device can be reduced.The proposed approach has been motivated by several projects of the priority program PP 1897 “calm, smooth and smart” and fits seamlessly into the second funding period. Beyond the priority program, such “smart arrays” may benefit from and contribute to a lot of related fields, such as product development, material sciences, additive manufacturing, MEMS and energy harvesting.