Vibrations in airplane wings have a negative impact on the quality and safety of a flight. For this reason, active vibration suppression techniques are of extreme importance. In this paper, a smart beam is used as a simulator for the airplane wings and a fractional order PD controller is designed for active vibration mitigation. To implement the ideal fractional order controller on the smart beam unit, its digital approximation is required. In this paper, a new continuous-to-discrete-time operator is used to obtain the discrete-time approximation of the ideal fractional order PD controller. The efficiency and flexibility, as well as some guidelines for using this new operator, are given. The numerical examples show that high accuracy of approximation is obtained and that the proposed method can be considered as a suitable solution for obtaining the digital approximation of fractional order controllers. The experimental results demonstrate that the designed controller can significantly improve the vibration suppression in smart beams
