Thomas Meurers
Postgraduate Research Student
Estimation and Control Group
School of Elec and Elec Engineering
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TT
Tel.: +44-(0)121-4144308
Fax: +44-(0)121-4144291
T.Meurers@bham.ac.uk

          Personal Background
  Active Vibration Control
       Links

I was born in Düsseldorf on the 17th November 1971 and finished school there in 1991. Afterwards I did for one year my military service, which is compulsory. This was followed by my undergraduated course in Electrical Engineering at the Ruhr-University in Bochum. I became a student co-worker for the Control Engineering Laboratory in 1995 until 1997. I spent the summer 1996 with Katra Ltd., Kaunas, Lithuania. In the beginning of 1997 I worked for a while for DaimlerChrysler Aerospace -Dornier- in Friedrichshafen.  In the end of 1997 I was chosen to be the first exchange student between my faculty in Bochum and the University of Birmingham. During that year I wrote my Diploma thesis at the School of Elec and Elec Engineering. I graduated in May 1998. I filled the gap between my graduation date and the start date for my PhD course with working for BP Amoco in Hull. Since October 1998 I am a postgraduate research student in the group for Estimation and Control. My supervisor is Dr. S. M. Veres and my project is Active Vibration Control (AVC) which is done in the Active Vibration and Sound.Control Laboratory. Since 1999 I am a Student Member of the IEEE and an Associate Member of the IEE.

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What is Active Vibration Control (AVC)?
The question is easily answered but to realize it on a real system is the challenging task. Classically approaches attenuate the vibrations by spring-mass-damper decoupling, where the resonant frequency is inversely proportional to the square root of the spring compliance and the mass. Therefore at low frequencies the volume and / or mass requirements are often impractical. Active attenuation seems to be the solution for low frequency vibration control. The principle is, that a secondary out-of-phase control wave is generated which eliminates the disturbing one like shown in the following figure (taken from the Virginia Vibration and Acoustics Laboratories):

Obviously the principle is fairly the simple but how should the control wave be generated. The wave is generated with a digital controller. And therefore somehow the controller must be tuned. There are different approaches, I tried an iterative feedback strategy, which worked to a certain degree. Now I am working on controllers in the frequency domain. We achieved attenuations up to 42 dB which basically means that there was no vibration left.

Why do we want to stop vibration?
Vibrations causes many problems, e.g. small amplitude vibration may cause errors in precision measurements or in manufacturing of semi-conductors. Large magnitude vibration could be a noise source disturbing the environment such as the sound of gas turbines.

What equipment do we use?
There are mainly three components involved with AVC. First the vibration has to be measured. A common vibration sensor is used for that. The signal is amplified and goes to the AD board to digitise the data for the Digital Signal Processor (DSP). This is the main unit, the controller is realised here. The calculated control signal is sent via a DA board to the actuator. Common actuators are piezo-electric elements. But we also try to use electro-magnetic actuators.

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• Active Vibration and Sound.Control Laboratory, Birmingham
• Institute of Sound and Vibration, University of Southampton
• Vibration Engineering, University of Sheffield
• Virginia Vibration and Acoustics Laboratories
• Acoustics and Vibrations WWW Virtual Library
• THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ACOUSTICS AND VIBRATION (IIAV)

• Ruhr-University Bochum
• Electrical Engineering, Bochum
• Control Engineering Laboratory, Bochum
• The University of Birmingham
• School of Elec and Elec Engineering, Birmingham
• Estimation and Control Group, Birmingham
• Aston University

I can not give to many links for this section because our faculty does not allow the internet use for non-academic purposes. This also means that there is no quarantee that the links are alright, they might not work.

• Academic is serious but there are also Jokes.
• Most of the Germans like Beer, at least that is said.
• I like playing Basketball, just for fun.
• Spiegel, Focus and Stern are german magazines.
• The Yellow Pages for England
• Düsseldorf is where I was born and grew up.
• Bochum is where I studied.
• Birmingham is the city where I am now.