Feasibility Study of Adaptive Control of Structures under Seismic Excitation

A preliminary experimental investigation is carried out to assess the feasibility of the adaptive feedforward control approach for the response reduction of structures excited by seismic ground motions. Although adaptive control has been used in many areas of engineering, its applications to control of civil engineering structures remains unexplored. The proposed methodology is presented together with a brief description of the theory. The adaptive feedforward methodology overcomes many of the shortcomings of previously proposed methods for structural control through the use of adaptive filters in conjunction with feedforward control. An experimental demonstration of the proposed method was carried out using a small-scale model of a three-story structure. The experimental study yielded very encouraging results thus showing the potential benefits of applying the adaptive feedforward method in structural control.