Tilt Active Vibration Isolation Using Vertical Pendulum and Piezoelectric Transducer with Parallel Controller

Abstract

Tilt vibrations inevitably have negative effects on some precise engineering even after applying horizontal and vertical vibration isolations. It is difficult to adopt a traditional passive vibration isolation (PVI) scheme to realize tilt vibration isolation. In this paper, we present and develop a tilt active vibration isolation (AVI) device using a vertical pendulum (VP) tiltmeter and a piezoelectric transducer (PZT). The potential resolution of the VP is dependent on the mechanical thermal noise in the frequency bandwidth of about 0.0265 nrad, which need not be considered because it is far below the ground tilt of the laboratory. The tilt sensitivity of the device in an open-loop mode, investigated experimentally using a voltage controller, is found to be (1.63±0.11)×105 V/rad. To compensate for the hysteresis nonlinearity of the PZT, we experimentally established the multi-loop mathematical model of hysteresis, and designed a parallel controller consisting of both a hysteresis inverse model predictor and a digital proportional–integral–differential (PID) adjuster. Finally, the response of the device working in close-loop mode to the tilt vibration was tested experimentally, and the tilt AVI device showed a good vibration isolation performance, which can remarkably reduce the tilt vibration, for example, from 6.0131 μrad to below 0.0103 μrad.