Experimental design of an active vibration control device used to protect cultural heritage objects

While light, temperature and humidity on cultural heritage objects are drastically controlled to assure their better conservation, it is not the case of the vibrations and their impact on the objects have received little consideration. Most of the proposed solutions to protect objects from vibrations suffer from a lack of adaptability and poor performances in the lowest frequency range. To tackle this issue, the development of a new kind of protection devices based on active control is proposed. The main challenge is to respect the cultural heritage ethics: non intrusiveness and reversibility. To adapt to a wide variety of cultural heritage objects, the proposed solution aims to minimize the vibrations of a museum’s shelf in real time. A replica of museum’s shelf is excited by a vibration exciter and a feedforward control configuration is used to monitor the shelf vibrations, by a reference signal measured on the shelf structure and actuators and error sensors placed on the shelf plate. This bench offers the opportunity to experiment multiple PAA (parameter adaptation algorithms) for which a parameter analysis can be performed. A comparative study based on criterions such as amplitude attenuation and time convergence is performed to find an optimized control configuration.