Dr. David Ma, April 26th
Modeling, Control, and Monitoring of Complex Structures
The response of structures to external disturbances has long been a
primary interest for engineers. Recent efforts to improve the reliability
and operational efficiency of structures have employed modeling, control,
and monitoring techniques. Significant advances using these techniques
are evident in many mechanical and aerospace applications.
In the first part of this talk, a modeling technique is presented, in
which simplified models of a complex structure are obtained using only
input and output data from actual measurements of structural motion.
Compared to other comparable models, these simplified models retain the
advantage of simplicity, which is desirable for control purposes,
but with much greater accuracy.
The second subject of this talk addresses the development of a
new adaptive control method. Here, the control design process
accounts for the external disturbances through a feed forward term.
An adaptive scheme is developed to update this feed forward gain to
guarantee improved control efficiency.
A time domain method for structural health monitoring comprises the third
topic of this talk. In this method, the coupling effects of the failure modes
are removed by projecting the measurements onto some subspaces. In this way,
the presence of damage and the corresponding location are simultaneously determined.
Finally, the alternative use of this technique in real time applications
is illustrated.
The presentation will conclude by highlighting ongoing and
future research projects.
