Active Vibration Control on a Tire–Wheel Assembly Using Piezoelectric Spatial Modal Filter

Vibrations due to tire–road contact in wheeled vehicles induce acoustic discomfort especially beyond 35 km/h. This paper proposes an active control method to reduce the vibration transmission from the tire–road contact to the vehicle through piezoelectric transducers located directly on the wheel spokes. Our approach relies on a double spatial modal filter to physically focus the control energy on the wheel pumping mode while avoiding any spillover phenomena. In addition, a bandpass controller ensures maximum damping on the targeted mode. The proposed control strategy is applied first to the clamped wheel in order to validate the static performance of the spatial controller. Then the wheel is excited through the tire and the efficiency of the controller is evaluated through the measured force passing by the wheel hub. Finally, the tire–wheel assembly (TWA) is placed on an experimental setup recreating the vehicle operating conditions with wheel rotation at different velocities and road excitations. The experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed control method and its robustness to the dynamics evolution of the structure in function of the TWA angular velocity.