Acceleration feedback control strategies for aseismic protection

One of the exciting new application areas for feedback system design has to do with the protection of civil engineering structures from earthquakes, from wind, or from waves. Preliminary indications are that control methods will be able to make a genuine contribution to this problem area, which is of great economic and social importance both in this country and abroad. As in most application-specific situation, not every control modelling, computation, and implementation method may be expected to make a material contribution to the practical solution. It seems at this point in the time, however, that the H₂ frequency domain methods, coupled with acceleration feedback, have a solid contribution to make. In this paper, the authors present experimental verification of the performance predictions of such strategies in the University of Notre Dame's Structural Dynamics and Control/Earthquake Engineering Laboratory. The written version of the paper provides a complete description of the facilities, as well as the problem formulation. The Conference Video Proceedings will contain a presentation of the structural control performance results.