A new electrical circuit with negative capacitances to enhance resistive shunt damping

This article proposes a new layout of electrical network based on two negative capacitance circuits, aimed at increasing the performances of a traditional resistive piezoelectric shunt for structural vibration reduction. It is equivalent to artificially increase the modal electromechanical coupling factor of the electromechanical structure by both decreasing the short-circuit natural frequencies and increasing the open-circuit ones. This leads to higher values of the modal electromechanical coupling factor with respect to simple negative capacitance configurations, when the same margin from stability is considered. This technique is shown to be powerful in enhancing the control performance when associated to a simple resistive shunt, usually avoided because of its poor performances.