On steady-state disturbance compensability for actuator placement in adaptive structures

Abstract

Abstract Adaptive structures in civil engineering are mechanical structures with the ability to modify their response to external loads. Actuators strongly affect a structure’s adaptivity and have to be placed thoughtfully in the design process to effectively compensate external loads. For constant loads, this property is introduced as steady-state disturbance compensability. This property can be linked to concepts from structural engineering such as redundancy or statical indeterminacy, thus representing an interdisciplinary approach. Based on the disturbance compensability matrix, a scalar performance metric is derived as quantitative measure of a structure’s ability to compensate the output error for arbitrary constant disturbances with a given set of actuators. By minimizing this metric, an actuator configuration is determined. The concept is applied to an example of a truss structure.