Research Article Fast Attitude Maneuver of a Flexible Spacecraft with Passive Vibration Control Using Shunted Piezoelectric Transducers Bassam A. Albassam King Saud University, College of Engineering, Mechanical Engineering Department, Box 800 Riyadh 11421, Saudi Arabia Correspondence should be addressed to Bassam A. Albassam; albassam@ksu.edu.sa Received 5 November 2017; Revised 6 October 2018; Accepted 21 October 2018; Published 17 January 2019 Academic Editor: Yue Wang Copyright © 2019 Bassam A. Albassam. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper is concerned with designing a bang-bang control input to perform a quick rotational maneuver of a rigid spacecraft hub connected with flexible appendages. The control design is based on only the rigid body mode making it very simple to design and at the same time achieve the quickest maneuver possible. The induced vibrations are suppressed using piezoelectric transducers bonded to the appendages and connected to an electric circuit with the objective of converting the vibrational energy to electrical energy and then dissipating it using passive electric elements, such as a resistance and an inductor. The proposed control design method is applied to a spacecraft containing a rigid hub and flexible appendages. The attitude control torque is produced using either the reaction wheels contained inside the rigid hub or jet thrusters mounted outside it. The control design process starts with deriving the nonlinear partial differential equations of motion for the spacecraft using Hamilton’s principle which accounts for the electromechanical coupling and the presence of resistive or resistive-inductive circuits. To simplify the analysis, the nonlinear ordinary differential equations of motion are then obtained using the assumed mode method. The effectiveness of the control design method is numerically tested on a spacecraft that is required to perform a quick attitude maneuver and, simultaneously, suppress the induced vibrations. The simulations show a quick and accurate maneuver has been achieved combined with very low levels of vibrations resulting from the reduced coupling between flexible and rigid motions as well as the damping added as a result of the passive shunt circuit. Furthermore, the resistance-inductance shunt circuit is shown to be more effective in damping the vibrations than the resistance shunt circuit. 1. Introduction In recent years, there has been a considerable interest in modelling and control of flexible spacecrafts. This is due to the use of lightweight materials for the purposes of speed and fuel efficiency. Furthermore, these spacecrafts are required to maneuver as quickly as possible without signifi- cant structural vibrations during and/or after a maneuver. Many researchers have used active control techniques to design controllers for both the attitude maneuver as well as the vibration suppression of flexible spacecrafts. Bang and Oh [1] have designed nonlinear predictive controller as well as robust output feedback for the attitude maneuver and vibration suppression of a flexible spacecraft. Their principal idea is to establish a reference trajectory and design a feed- back control law which forces the system output variables to follow that trajectory. Yan and Wu [2] have achieved high-precision attitude stabilization for the flexible spacecraft in the presence of disturbances, including vibrations, by com- bining extended disturbance observer (EDO) with a back- stepping feedback controller. The EDO observer is used to estimate the space environmental disturbances, unmodeled dynamics, and the disturbances caused by the elastic vibra- tions of flexible appendages. The design of an adaptive out- put feedback control law for the rotational maneuver and vibration suppression of a flexible spacecraft, with a model that includes unstructured uncertainties, is proposed by Singh and Zhang [3]. Okubo and Kuwamoto [4] have addressed the issue of agile attitude maneuver control of flex- ible spacecraft using control moment gyroscopes. The atti- tude maneuver as well as the induced vibration suppression is achieved using an integrated feedback/feedforward control Hindawi International Journal of Aerospace Engineering Volume 2019, Article ID 3162105, 18 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/3162105