Flexible structures are increasingly used in various applications such as aerospace, automotive and so on. Since they are lightly damped and susceptible to vibrations, active vibration control is desirable. In practice, in addition to achieving effective vibration reduction, we have also to consider the required control energy to avoid the energy insufficiency, the control input to avoid control saturation and reduce the effects of measurement noises. On the other hand, as flexible structures have infinite number of resonant modes and only the first few can be employed in the system modeling and the controller design, there always exist neglected high-frequency dynamics, which can induce the spillover instability. Furthermore, the parametric uncertainties on modal parameters can degrade the control performances and even destabilize the closed-loop system. In this context, a quantitative robust control methodology for active vibration control of flexible structure is proposed in this thesis. Phase and gain control polices are first proposed to enforce frequency-dependent phase and gain requirements on the controller, which can be realized by the output feedback H1 control design. The phase and gain control polices based H1 control can make a trade-off among the complete set of control objectives and offer a qualitative robust controller. Especially, the LPV H1 control is used to reduce the required control energy for LPV systems. The generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) framework with finite element analysis is employed for uncertainty quantification. It allows us to investigate the effects of structural property uncertainties on natural frequencies and achieve their probabilistic information. Then, in the presence of parametric and dynamic uncertainties, µ / v analysis and the random algorithm using Monte Carlo Method are used to quantitatively ensure the closed-loop stability and performance robustness properties both in deterministic and probabilistic senses. The proposed quantitative robust control methodology is thus developed by employing various techniques from automatic control and mechanical engineering, thus reducing the gap between them for robust vibration control of flexible structures. Its effectiveness are verified by numerical simulations and experimental validation on LTI and LPV non-collocated piezoelectric cantilever beams.
