Experimental study of instantaneous probabilistic energy control for seismically excited structures

In the previous study, authors developed a probabilistic algorithm for active control of structures. In the probabilistic control algorithm, the control force is determined by the probability that the structural energy exceeds a specified target critical energy, and the direction of a control force is determined by Lyapunov controller design method. In this paper, an experimental verification of the proposed probabilistic control algorithm is presented. A three-story test structure equipped with an active mass driver (AMD) was used. The effectiveness of the control algorithm was examined exciting the test structure using a sinusoidal signal, a scaled El-Centro earthquake and a broadband Gaussian white noise. Specially, experiments on control had been performed under a different condition to that of system identification hi order to prove the stability and robustness of the proposed control algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the probabilistic control algorithm can achieve a significant response reduction under various types of ground excitations even when the modeling error exists.