Foltete E., Collet M., Mammosser D.

In the fields of active control, active or passive damping, energy scavenging, most of the applications are based on the use of electro-mechanical transducers. For many reasons, piezoelectric devices are very often chosen to insure the conversion between the mechanical and the electrical quantities. Nevertheless, electromagnetic devices can be in some cases of great interest. This study is focused on the use of a contact-less electromagnetic actuator for active or passive damping and energy scavenging purpose. Its great advantage compared to piezoelectric transducers is the absence of purely mechanical coupling. A reliable multi-physic modelling can thus easily be obtained and optimisation studies can be performed. The studied structure is an academic cantilever beam around its first bending mode. This mono-dimensional case allows analytical developments and some interesting results are found concerning the energy balance between the structure and the feedback loop. For example, it is shown that the optimal feedback for passive damping is different from the one for energy scavenging.