Abstract: This paper investigated the vibration suppression system for vertical tail. Firstly, the actuators and sensors were divided into two groups according to the results of modal tests, and attached to the opposite side of vertical tail with a mirror image. To overcome the unstable problem caused by the coupling of output signal and reference signal, a feed forward decoupling algorithm was proposed. Finally a smart vertical tail was designed to reduce the fatigue damage through suppressing its vibration. The experimental results showed that the vibration response of vertical tail was suppressed significantly.

Key words: perpendicular empennage, piezoelectric smart structures, active vibration control, adaptive algorithm