Optimal placement of piezoelectric actuator/senor patches pair in sandwich plate by improved genetic algorithm

Abstract

The present study investigates the employing of piezoelectric patches in active control of a sandwich plate. Indeed, the active control and optimal patch distribution on this structure are presented together. A sandwich plate with honeycomb core and composite reinforced by carbon nanotubes in facesheet layers is considered so that the optimum position of actuator/sensor patches pair is guaranteed to suppress the vibration of sandwich structures. The sandwich panel consists of a search space which is a square of 200 × 200 mm with a numerous number of candidates for the optimum position. Also, different dimension of square and rectangular plates to obtain the optimal placement of piezoelectric actuator/senor patches pair is considered. Based on genetic algorithm and LQR, the optimum position of patches and fitness function is determined, respectively. The present study reveals that the efficiency and performance of LQR control is affected by the optimal placement of the actuator/sensor patches pair to a large extent. It is also shown that an intelligent selection of the parent, repeated genes filtering, and 80% crossover and 20% mutation would increase the convergence of the algorithm. It is noted that a fitness function is achieved by collection actuator/sensor patches pair cost functions in the same position (controllability). It is worth mentioning that the study of the optimal location of actuator/sensor patches pair is carried out for different boundary conditions of a sandwich plate such as simply supported and clamped boundary conditions.