Do-Hyung Kim, Tae-Joo Kim, Se-Un Jung and Dong-Il Kwake
International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sicences, vol. 17, no. 3, pp.442-453, 2016

Abstract : A significant source of vibration in helicopters is the main rotor system, and it is a technical challenge to reduce the vibration in order to ensure the comfort of crew and passengers. Several types of passive devices have been applied to conventional helicopters in order to reduce the vibration. In recent years, helicopter manufacturers have increasingly adopted active vibration control systems (AVCSs) due to their superior performance with lower weight compared with passive devices. AVCSs can also maintain their performance over aircraft configuration and flight condition changes. As part of the development of AVCS software for light civil helicopter (LCH) applications, a test bench is constructed and vibration control tests and simulations are performed in this study. The test bench, which represents the airframe, is excited using a pair of counter rotating force generators (CRFGs) and a multiple input single output (MISO) AVCS that consists of three accelerometer sensors and a pair of CRFGs; a filtered-x least mean square (LMS) algorithm is applied for the vibration reduction. First, the vibration control tests are performed with uniform sensor weights; then, the change in the control performance according to changes in the sensor weight is investigated and compared with the simulation results. It is found that the vibration control performance can be tuned through adjusting the weights of the three sensors, even if only one actuator is used.

Keyword : active vibration control system (AVCS), multiple input single output (MISO), counter rotating force generator (CRFG), sensor weight