Settels Savenije van Amelsvoort is interested in investigating the use of piezoelectric shunt damping for a measurement and calibrations setup. The goal is to damp the remaining vibrations from previous vibration isolation stages to sub-nanometre amplitude. There was interest in piezoelectric shunt damping as a damping mechanism. Although piezoelectric shunt damping has previously been achieved at nanometre level and high frequency, the use of piezoelectric shunt damping at (sub)nanometre amplitude and low resonance frequency is still an open challenge and a novel application.

In order to test the feasibility of this application, a test setup is constructed. The experiment is performed on several vibrations isolation stages and with two different shunts. The final setup is able to damp the vibrations at 100 nm and indicates that it can damp vibrations at 50 nm. However, the results at 50 nm are inconclusive due to the resolution of the sensor and vibrations induced by the ground motion. For future research it is recommended to increase the vibration isolation and to use a sensor with higher resolution, this might show that damping at sub-nanometre amplitudes is feasible.