In this thesis a piezo-electro-mechanical system, constituted of an aluminum beam with five piezoelectric patches glued on it, each of them shunted with an RL electrical circuit, has been numerically and experimentally investigated, in order to determine the optimal electric tuning parameters for vibration damping. A numerical code based upon Galerkin weighted-residual method is developed and the complete piezo-electro-mechanical system is designed, realized and finally tested by a standard modal testing technique. Comparisons between different shunting configurations of the system are given and finally the experimental data are compared with ones obtained by the developed numerical code in order to verify the accuracy of the latter.

Master of Science