Moving horizon estimator for vibration control of high-rising structures

For the reduction of structural vibrations, the semi-active control approach for tuned liquid column dampers has proven to be successful in practice. The challenge is to provide all system states necessary for a semi-active controller, due to the difficulties of measuring the system states of high-rising structures. Therefore, the focus of this work is on a moving horizon estimator, to obtain displacement, velocity and frequency of the structure’s oscillation. For the estimation problem, a coupled system consisting of a single-degree-of-freedom system and a tuned liquid column damper is considered. Very good estimation results could be achieved by using the water deflection of the tuned liquid column damper and the acceleration of the structure as measurement inputs to the moving horizon estimator. To emulate the coupled system, a shaking table with a mechanical damper model is used in a laboratory environment. The moving horizon estimator is evaluated by running it in Matlab/Simulink
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utilizing measurement data. An estimation error of the frequency less than 0.028 Hz was achieved while the emulated structure’s oscillation where changing its amplitude and frequency.