Adaptive vibration control of a flexible structure based on hybrid learning controlled active mass damping

Abstract

Natural disasters such as earthquakes and strong winds will lead to vibrations in ultra-high or high-rise buildings and even the damages of the structures. The traditional approaches resist the destructive effects of natural disasters through enhancing the performance of the structure itself. However, due to the unpredictability of the disaster strength, the traditional approaches are no longer appropriate for earthquake mitigation in building structures. Therefore, designing an effective intelligent control method for suppressing vibrations of the flexible buildings is significant in practice. This paper focuses on a single-floor building-like structure with an active mass damper (AMD) and proposes a hybrid learning control strategy to suppress vibrations caused by unknown time-varying disturbances (earthquake, strong wind, etc.). As the flexible building structure is a distributed parameter system, a novel finite dimension dynamic model is firstly constructed by assumed mode method (AMM) to effectively analyze the complex dynamics of the flexible building stucture. Secondly, an adaptive hybrid learning control based on full-order state observer is designed through back-stepping method for dealing with system uncertainties, unknown disturbances and immeasurable states. Thirdly, semi-globally uniformly ultimate boundedness (SGUUB) of the closed-loop system is guaranteed via Lyapunov’s stability theory. Finally, the experimental investigation on Quanser Active Mass Damper demonstrates the effectiveness of the presented control approach in the field of vibration suppression. The research results will bring new ideas and methods to the field of disaster reduction for the engineering development.