A piezoelectric shunt damping system was investigated to reduce the vibration of a spinning beam, and a simulated-annealing (SA) algorithm was used to optimize the values of R and L in the piezoelectric shunt circuit to achieve the maximum suppression effect. The dynamic equations of the beam were derived using Hamilton′s principle with the Rayleigh Ritz method. In addition, the transfer function between the displacement response and force was presented. An optimization model of the transfer function was built, and the SA algorithm was employed to minimize the objective functions in the appropriately defined optimization problems. The simulation results show that the SA algorithm obtained a good optimization effect and a much higher efficiency compared with the Genetic algorithm. The results also show that the piezoelectric shunt damping system can markedly suppress the vibration of the spinning beam.