Simulation and experiment on lateral vibration transmission control of a shafting system with active stern support

•An active stern support is proposed to suppress lateral vibration transmission in the shaft-hull system.•The active stern support uses six active struts instead of a common stern bearing support.•The dynamic model is built by the Timoshenko beam theory and the FRF-based synthesis method.•An adaptive control algorithm with consideration of the cross coupling is constructed.•The performance of vibration suppression is validated by numerical simulations and experiments.