| Abstract: | The dynamic responses of tall civil structures due to earthquakes are very important to the civil engineer. These dynamic responses can produce situations that can range from uncomfortable to unsafe for the building occupants. In recent years classical control theory has been used in civil engineering to reduce the dynamic responses of tall civil structures. Most optimal control algorithms for civil structures involve full state feedback control which requires good estimates of the velocity and displacements throughout the structure. However, there are several important advantages of output feedback control: it takes less computational effort and it has the robustness of passive systems. In this paper, optimal control algorithms are formulated for the optimization of feedback gains and controller placement for building structures. The fundamental basis for these algorithms is the calculation of the gradient of the performance function with respect to the gain matrix. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated for deterministic earthquake loads in the time domain. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
