Vibration suppression using two-terminal flywheel. Part I: Modeling and characterization

Abstract

There is only one manipulation terminal for a flywheel in terms of the topology, which remains a potential bottleneck for its application in mechanical systems. This paper presents a two-terminal manipulation approach for the flywheel using the inverse screw transmission which yields the relative translation between two terminals resulting from the rotation of the flywheel. A dynamics model is accordingly put forward to describe both an ideal two-terminal mass and a non-ideal case including factors such as structure mass, friction, backlash and elastic effect. A prototype device is manufactured and subsequently characterized using a vibration rig to identify the model parameters. The results show that, in the commonly used frequency band, the effect of non-ideal factors is insignificant and thus the device can be regarded as an ideal two-terminal mass. However, the impact of the non-ideal factors should be taken into account in the other frequency ranges. The proposed two-terminal approach releases the ground terminal of the flywheel and has a great application potential in vibration control.