Semi-active control of a cable-stayed bridge under multiple-support excitations

This paper presents a semi-active strategy for seismic protection of a benchmark cable-stayed bridge with consideration of multiple-support excitations. In this control strategy, Magnetorheological (MR) dampers are proposed as control devices, a LQG-clipped-optimal control algorithm is employed. An active control strategy, shown in previous researches to perform well at controlling the benchmark bridge when uniform earthquake motion was assumed, is also used in this study to control this benchmark bridge with consideration of multiple-support excitations. The performance of active control system is compared to that of the presented semi-active control strategy. Because the MR fluid damper is a controllable energy-dissipation device that cannot add mechanical energy to the structural system, the proposed control strategy is fail-safe in that bounded-input, bounded-output stability of the controlled structure is guaranteed. The numerical results demonstrated that the performance of the presented control design is nearly the same as that of the active control system; and that the MR dampers can effectively be used to control seismically excited cable-stayed bridges with multiple-support excitations.