Research project: Hybrid active and passive structural noise control
Space missions that involve satellites with highly sensitive instrumentation packages perhaps raise the most challenging vibration control issues. Often these packages must be supported on structures where the vibration levels have been reduced to micro-levels. Needless to say that these instruments, that may form one of the individual sensors of a multi-sensor interferometric telescope or synthetic aperture radar, must function correctly. To add to the complexity of the problem, they are sitting on structural booms tens of meters apart with the relative motions between their ends restricted to microns over wide ranges of excitation frequency. Despite a number of proposed design approaches in this field, it is still not clear how best to proceed to meet these demanding requirements.
