Decentralization of
Smart Structure Technologies Ð
Semi-Active
Structural Control and Wireless Monitoring
Professor
Jerome P. Lynch
Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering
A smart civil structure is defined by the inclusion of
sensing and actuation technologies embedded within the system to monitor and
control the structureÕs response.
The past thirty years have been characterized by a revolution in the
field of smart structure technologies with sensors and actuators both reducing
in size, power demands and unit costs.
This presentation is chiefly focused upon enhancing the performance of
smart structure technologies through decentralization of the monitoring and
control architectures. The
benefits of installing a monitoring system in a structure are multiple,
including opportunities to assess the health of structural systems over their
expected life spans. Historically,
monitoring systems for civil structures are wire-based and employ hub-spoke
system architectures; unfortunately, high installation and maintenance costs
prevent them from becoming widely adopted. Using available technologies from the marketplace, a low
cost wireless alternative to traditional wire-based sensing systems has been
developed. Convergence of powerful
mobile computing with sensing allows for extensive data interrogation to be
performed at the sensor in a decentralized computing network. Structural control systems are often
used to limit the response of structures during external disturbances such as
strong winds or large seismic events.
As the trend of control devices progresses towards smaller and cheaper
actuators, structural control systems will be characterized by increasingly
larger arrays of actuators.
This complex large-scale dynamic system is best controlled by
decentralized control approaches.
A novel approach based upon static economic optimization methods is
proposed to control large-scale dynamic systems. Termed market-based control, the method has been shown to
perform well in semi-active structural control systems.
3:30 Ð 4:30 p.m.