High-fidelity control of a seismic shake table

Abstract

A high-fidelity PC-based control system has been developed to improve the tracking characteristics of a small-scale seismic motion simulator used for testing structural control designs. This work outlines the development and testing of the control system. First, the simulator hardware is described in detail. The process of constructing a mechanistic model of the system and identifying model parameters is then described. Next, a closed-loop feedback/feed-forward control algorithm, based on an optimal receding horizon formulation, is developed. The control design was tested and the results indicate that the seismic shake table precisely tracked reference seismic motions. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.