Active Control of Flexible Structures

Abstract

In the context of civil structural engineering, the idea of using automatic control systems to reduce the vibration induced in structures such as buildings, bridges, towers, and others by loads such as earthquakes, wind, moving traffic, etc., has been considered increasingly over the last three decades. This chapter describes the implementation of the extended strategy of predictive control in an experimental building structure subjected to seismic actions. This application was part of a project conducted at the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA, in 1986. It was one of the first implementations of feedback control in the structural domain. In comparison with other applications included in this book, the one described in this chapter allows to illustrate the application of predictive control through a state space model. First, the chapter describes the experimental setup. Then, it summarizes the formulation of the extended strategy of predictive control for this problem and, finally, the experimental results are presented and discussed.