Georgia Tech

School of Aerospace Engineering

Introduction

The Structural Dynamics and Smart Structures Laboratory is involved in most of the areas of smart structures. The main project at this time is the application of smart structures in the alleviation of buffet induced vibrations in twin tails high performance aircrafts. Another research area is the online, or real time, detection of structural anomalies such as delaminations and impact damages in composites, debonding in sandwich structures and cracks. Also, acoustic control was studied with the smart guitar project.

Facilities

The equipment available in the laboratory includes:

• many types of sensors ranging from accelerometers to PVDF sensors,
• many types of actuators ranging from 50 lb. Shakers to PZT wafers and stack actuators,
• electronic devices such as signal generators, power amplifiers, filters and oscilloscopes,
• a Genrad computer aided test system with the Modal Plus software from SDRC for modal analysis purposes,
• three IBM PC compatible computers with softwares such as Matlab, Mathematica etc.,
• two Digital Signal Processor systems for control simulation and implementation:
  • a dSPACE DS1102 Board 40 Mflops system, with 2 ADC 16 bits channels, 2 ADC 12 bits channels and 4 DAC 14 bits channels,
  • a dSPACE DS1004 Based System at 600 Mflops, with 5 ADC 16 bits channels, 5 DAC 14 bits channels, expandable.

The Mathworks sofwares Matlab, Simulink, System Identification Toolboxes, Control Toolboxes are used for system identification procedures and for controller design, simulation and implementation. Another Matlab toolbox from Scientific Software, the Structural Dynamic Toolbox, is used for simple Finite Element Computation. Both DSP Systems are programmed using Matlab, Simulink and the Real Time Workshop.

Further, the School of Aerospace Engineering has a Structure Laboratory with other test equipments for impact testing, crack propagation study, etc., a Composite Laboratory , a Wind Tunnel Facility and a Professional Machine Shop. Workstations Facilities are also available from the College of Engineering with Finite Element Packages such as ASTROS, ANSYS and Ideas, the later can also be used for modal analysis purpose.