Actuators and sensors allocation for adjacent buildings vibration control

This paper puts forward an actuators and sensors allocation approach to the design of the adjacent buildings vibration attenuation under seismic excitation. A full order model of an adjacent buildings system with the location information of actuators and sensors is considered and by retaining the modes which make the largest contributions to the model with the Modal Cost Analysis (MCA), a reduced order model is established so that the controller can be designed conveniently. In view of the fact that not all the states of the system can be measured by the sensors, a dynamic output feedback H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">∞</sub> controller is designed for the adjacent buildings system. By considering that the output powers of the actuators are limited, a mixed H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">∞</sub> =GH <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> control is employed. Genetic algorithm (GA) is brought forward to design the dynamic output feedback controller and obtain the locations of the actuators and sensors. With the proposed approach, the allocation problem is solved and corresponding controller is obtained, which attenuates the building vibration at a sufficiently low level with constrained acting forces. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in attenuating building vibration under earthquake excitation and some comparisons are made among the building systems with different quantities of actuators.