Vibration Isolation System with Kalman Filter Estimated Acceleration Feedback: An Approach of Negative Stiffness Control

This paper presents the isolation of vibration through the acceleration feedback of the Kalman filter. In this paper, vibration isolation was analyzed both analytically and experimentally through the estimation of the Kalman filter (KF). A negative stiffness mechanism was used to reduce the level of vibration for the developed dynamic system. The technique of negative stiffness can provide stiffness of infinite level to low stiffness as well as disturbance generated by the ground vibration directly. The performance of an isolation system through a mechanism of negative stiffness was improved by the addition of acceleration feedback. Acceleration was measured using a microelectromechanical (MEMS) type accelerometer instead of traditional servo type accelerometers due to lower cost. However, the output of a microelectromechanical (MEMS) type accelerometer is usually noisy. To avoid this difficulty, an acceleration that was estimated by a Kalman filter was considered in the acceleration feedback instead of directly measured acceleration. The dynamic behaviors of the system were compared for both the Kalman-filtered acceleration and the directly measured acceleration feedback. It is observed that the former has a significant effect on the improvement of the characteristics of the vibration isolation systems than later.