Experimental Parametric Identification of a Flexible Beam Using Piezoelectric Sensors and Actuators

Abstract

Experimental system identification of a flexible beam based on sweep square excitation is studied. For the purpose of nonparametric identification, an excitation signal is conducted to evaluate the frequency response of the system. The experiment is designed to excite the beam using a piezo actuator, in a way to raise the chance of exciting first three natural modes. In order to find the best linear representation of the real system, two different identification methods are applied. First, autoregressive moving average eXogenous method is employed to identify the transfer function of the beam. Then, the identification is carried out using the subspace identification method to obtain the state space model. A comparison is made between different orders of prediction and the best chosen models of the two identification methods are compared with each other to select the most accurate linear system. Furthermore, as the identified model has to fulfill the controllability and observability conditions, the amenable system is achieved after some order reductions. Two reduction methods called minimum truncation and maximum DC gains matching are utilized to find the most effective reduced order. The outcome of this study will bring in the best linear representation of the beam coupled with piezoelectric sensors/actuators.