Abstract

Abstract. The active aeroelastic control aims the reduction or elimination of harmful fluid-structure interaction effects. More recently, piezo-fiber composites, made from piezoelectric fibers embedded into composites, represent a major technological breakthrough for the manufacture of aerospace intelligent structures. The design and synthesis of intelligent sys-tems requires some effort to assess adequate sensor and actuator positioning and perfor-mance. Typically, sensors location or arrangements have been determined by using optimiza-tion approaches, in order to get the optimal performance in a particular system application. In the smart structures literature, it is usual to find investigations on PZT sensors arrange-ment optimization based on modal responses. Piezo-fiber composites may furnish appropriate framework to enhance sensor effective, in special when composite structures are considered. Moreover, each piezo-fiber composite sensor may be optimized, allowing adjustments of their internal laminate and PZT fibers, thereby reducing the number of required sensors and im-proving their integration to the primary structure. This paper presents an investigation on piezo-fiber composites optimization viewing their application as modal sensors or filtering. In this context, sensor tailoring is suggested by configuring the internal layers. The piezo-fiber composite sensor is assumed with internal layers and an extra embedded PZT fibers. Optimi-zation is performed to each layer direction by exploring a metrics on sensor response in mod-al coordinates for a range in the frequency domain. The finite element modeling is used to represent the dynamics of a uniform plate structure and the piezo-composite. The genetic al-gorithm is considered as optimization tool using modal parameters to achieve a cost function.