Active Vibration Suppression of the Power Take-Off (PTO) Shaft in Attached Agricultural Implements Using Piezoelectric Actuators and Robust Control Systems

Abstract

Severe mechanical vibrations in the Power Take-Off (PTO) shafts of agricultural implements represent a significant engineering challenge, leading to reduced operational lifespan, increased maintenance costs, and degraded performance accuracy, this research addresses this problem by designing and developing an Active Vibration Control (AVC) system, the proposed solution is based on the systematic integration of piezoelectric actuators, known for their rapid response and wide bandwidth, with an H-infinity (H∞) robust control strategy, which is capable of guaranteeing performance and stability even in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances, a dynamic mathematical model of the shaft was developed using the Finite Element Method (FEM), and all stages of controller design and simulation were executed within the open-source Python environment, leveraging its specialized scientific libraries.

Comprehensive numerical simulation results demonstrated that the proposed closed-loop system is capable of achieving a significant reduction in vibration amplitude across a wide range of operating conditions compared to the open-loop system, also robustness tests proved the controller's ability to maintain its high performance under variations in system parameters, thereby demonstrating the viability and effectiveness of the proposed approach as an advanced and reliable solution for the problem of vibrations in agricultural mechanization.