Why mechathons are used to benchmark existing technologies and encourage knowledge transfer.
Benchmarking workshops (also called mechathons when held in the area of mechatronics) can be used to benchmark existing technologies and bring together experts of the same field in order to encourage knowledge transfer and future cooperation. Within the frameworks of the Comet K2 Research Center “Symbiotic Mechatronics“ of the Linz Center of Mechatronics (LCM) and the “Mechatronics Alliance”, a European network of applied research organizations, a vibration damping mechathon was organized in September 2018 in Linz.
The participants applied several vibration damping concepts and actuators on 3 different test set-ups (demonstrators). Each participating team had a very limited time slot of 2,5 hours to work on one of the demonstrators. After discussion and measurement of the results, the teams rotated to the next demonstrators. The workshop in Linz was more focused on knowledge-exchange and hands-on working in limited time than on competition.
In this paper the 3 test set-ups are described in detail as well as the actuators and control strategies applied.
The demonstrators represent 3 typical situations in vibration damping: an almost undamped multi-story building, a rigid plate supported by passive rubber damping elements excited by an unbalanced rotor and a clamped flexible plate excited by a loudspeaker.
As control strategies and actuators the following concepts have been applied successfully: piezo-electric actuated tuned-mass-damper (TMD), shunt damping, electromagnetic actuator, piezo-electric patch transducers, modal control, velocity feedback and different variants of least-mean squares (LMS) adaptive filter systems. The paper presents a comparison of the results and a discussion of applied and possible alternative damping approaches for each test set-up.
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