An Improved Substructuring Control Strategy based on the Adaptive Minimal Control Synthesis Control Algorithm

Abstract

The use of the minimal control synthesis (MCS) adaptive control algorithm in substructuring experiments is examined in this paper. Substructuring is a method of dynamically testing a system by splitting it into two parts, one of which contains the region of particular interest and is tested experimentally. The rest of the system is contained in the second part and is modelled numerically. These two parts interact in real-time to emulate the complete system. For an accurate representation of the whole system, control of the displacements imposed on the experimental test specimen is crucial. In this paper, the performance of the MCS algorithm at controlling an actuator used to impose the displacement on the experimental specimen is examined for a one-degree-of-freedom system. Based on these results, an improvement to the MCS control strategy is proposed and tested. Finally, a comparison between the modified MCS-based control strategy and a linear controller is conducted to demonstrate the potential advantage of this adaptive strategy.