Model Predictive Control for a Force-constrained Tuned Inertial Mass Electromagnetic Transducer

Abstract

Recently, inerter technologies have been integrated into structural control devices for protecting civil structures subject to external disturbances such as earthquakes and strong winds. One of these devices is the tuned viscous mass damper (TVMD), which consists of an inerter, a viscous damper, and a supporting spring. The effectiveness of the TVMD was already shown, and it has been put to practical use in many actual civil structures. However, it has been pointed out that excessive response force is applied to the supporting member in the structure when a huge earthquake in input to the structure where the TVMD is installed. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a tuned inertial mass electromagnetic transducer (TIMET) controlled by a model predictive control (MPC) strategy. The TIMET has a similar configuration to the TVMD except that the TIMET uses a motor instead of the viscous damper in the TVMD. Besides, MPC is a well-known algorithm to impose constraints easily on the control conditions. Thus, the aims of this research are to propose a force-constrained TIMET and to examine its performance under seismic loadings. A single-degree-of-freedom system equipped with the TIMET device is employed as a numerical example. Then, numerical simulations of this system subject to the 1940 El Centro and 1995 Kobe earthquake records are performed to verify the proposed strategy. The results showed that the force-constrained MPC method was able to reduce the control force of the TIMET, and that the response displacement and acceleration of the structure were reduced effectively.