Equivalent Active Circuits of Distributed Control Systems

Modeling distributed parameter systems (DPS) by electronic circuits and fabricating the complicated equivalent circuits to evaluate the system characteristics always poses many challenging research issues for years. Modeling and analysis of distributed sensing/control of smart structures and distributed structronic systems are even scarce. This paper is to present a technique to model distributed structronic systems with electronic circuits and to evaluate control behaviors with the fabricated equivalent circuits. Electrical analogies and analysis of distributed structronic systems is proposed and dynamics and control of beam/sensor/actuator systems are investigated. To determine the equivalent circuits and system parameters, higher order partial derivatives are simplified using the finite difference method; partial differential equations (PDE) are transformed to finite difference equations and further represented by electronic components and circuits. To provide better signal management and stability, active electronic circuit systems are designed and fabricated. Electric signals from the distributed system circuits (i.e., soft and hard) are compared with results obtained by classical theoretical and other (e.g., the finite element, and experimental) techniques.