Design of controlled elastic and inelastic structures

One of the founders of structural control theory and its application in civil engineering, Professor Emeritus Tsu T. Soong, envisioned the development of the integral design of structures protected by active control devices. Most of his disciples and colleagues continuously attempted to develop procedures to achieve such integral control. In his recent papers published jointly with some of the authors of this paper, Professor Soong developed design procedures for the entire structure using a design - redesign procedure applied to elastic systems. Such a procedure was developed as an extension of other work by his disciples. This paper summarizes some recent techniques that use traditional active control algorithms to derive the most suitable (optimal, stable) control force, which could then be implemented with a combination of active, passive and semi-active devices through a simple match or more sophisticated optimal procedures. Alternative design can address the behavior of structures using Liapunov stability criteria. This paper shows a unified procedure which can be applied to both elastic and inelastic structures. Although the implementation does not always preserve the optimal criteria, it is shown that the solutions are effective and practical for design of supplemental damping, stiffness enhancement or softening, and strengthening or weakenin

Optimal weakening and damping using polynomial control for seismically excited nonlinear structures

This paper presents an approach for the optimal design of a new retrofit technique called weakening and damping that is valid for civil engineering inelastic structures. An alternative design methodology is developed with respect to the existing ones that is able to determine the locations and the magnitude of weakening and/or softening of structural elements and adding damping while insuring structural stability. An optimal polynomial controller that is a summation of polynomials in nonlinear states is used in Phase 1 of the method to reduce the peak response quantities of seismically excited nonlinear or hysteretic systems. The main advantage of the optimal polynomial controller is that it is able to automatically stabilize the structural system. The optimal design of a shear-type structure is used as an example to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, which leads to a reduction of both peak inter-story drifts and peak total acceleration