Vibration Control of Heavy Fluid-Loaded Plates Using Piezoelectric Patches
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2025
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The vibroacoustic response of plate- and shell-like structures subjected to external excitations is a critical issue in many engineering fields, including automotive, aerospace, and marine applications. Structures such as car bodies, aircraft fuselages, and ship hulls often experience significant vibrations and elevated noise levels due to external forces, which can lead to discomfort, reduced performance, or structural failure. Effective control of these vibrations, whether induced by deterministic forces such as mechanical point loads or by random excitations such as wall pressures from turbulent boundary layers, is therefore essential.
Although numerous studies have explored vibration control of structures in light fluid environments such as air, there is little research on the vibration control of structures immersed in heavy fluids, such as water. Only a few investigations have addressed using piezoelectric patches for the vibration control of heavy fluid-loaded plates and shells, and these are typically based on the finite element method or experiments. While experiments can be costly for parametric studies, the finite element method is computationally expensive, especially for mid- to high-frequency analysis, where both the fluid domain and the structure must be discretised with a fine mesh for accurate solutions. Currently, there is a lack of analytical models to efficiently predict and control the vibroacoustic response of fluid-loaded plates equipped with piezoelectric elements under deterministic and stochastic excitations.
This research aims to fill this gap by developing an efficient semi-analytical model capable of predicting and controlling the vibration of fluid-loaded plates equipped with piezoelectric patches. The study reviews existing vibration control methods for plates and shells and proposes a new semi-analytical framework for plates with arbitrary boundary conditions under deterministic or random forces. The model is then used to investigate passive vibration control strategies such as shunt circuits connected to piezoelectric patches, and active vibration control using piezoelectric actuators for plates immersed in light or heavy fluids. In addition to evaluating vibration control performance, this study examines its effect on the radiated sound power of fluid-loaded plates. The analytical results demonstrate that shunted piezoelectric damping is effective in reducing vibration amplitude and radiated sound power of heavy fluid-loaded plates under deterministic and stochastic excitations. Additionally, a new formulation of non-negative intensity for unbaffled plates is developed to identify the regions of a vibrating plate under turbulent boundary layer excitation that contribute most to far-field sound radiation, providing insight into the radiated sound controllability from the proposed vibration control strategies.
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