Optimization of the on/off status configuration of control units in an active vibration isolation system—experiment

Active vibration isolation (AVI) is an important measure to attenuate vibration transmission in underwater vehicles and multiple active control units are usually used to attenuate low frequency vibrations induced by power equipment. Under certain operation conditions, however, the pre-installed control units in an AVI system may be redundant. Hence, it is necessary to optimize the on/off status configuration of all the control units. An optimization approach is proposed for configuration optimization of control units and validated by experiments. The criterion of the proposed approach is derived from the vibration responses of the monitoring points. The involved optimization, formulated as a constrained 0–1 nonlinear programming problem, utilizes the on/off status of control units as the input variable and the number of active units as the constraint. Optimized configurations were obtained by solving the nonlinear programming problem and deployed to the experimental system. The test results have demonstrated that vibration of the monitoring points can be effectively suppressed by activating only a portion of control units, and the configurations corresponding to maximum vibration reduction vary with different excitations.