Integration of Health Monitoring and Control of Building Structures during Earthquakes

A hybrid real-time structural health monitoring and control system for building structures is presented in this study. A model-reference adaptive control algorithm for the designed substructures was developed and integrated with a previously developed interstory drift-based acceleration feedback method for health monitoring. A virtual healthy model, installed with health monitors, is used to generate proper control forces to obtain the desired response for the controlled substructure during a disastrous event such as an earthquake. An adaptive controller and an adaptation mechanism are designed using the Lyapunov theory to calculate the real-time adaptive control force. The local feedback control actuates the actual substructures to track the desired response signals. The results obtained by numerical simulations for the illustrative example in this study are further validated by experimental investigations using a 3-story aluminum frame structure. The asymptotical tracking of the state of the substructure and convergence of the time-varying parameters in the adaptive controller are found to be in agreement with the experimental data obtained for this example. Several representative experimental data sets are compared with the corresponding numerical simulation results for this example with favorable correlations.