Distributed Control Design for Structures Subjected to Traveling Loads

This paper presents a novel distributed control method that adapts the structures subjected to traveling loads. The adaptation is realized by changes of the damping of the structure’s supports. The control objective is to provide smooth passage of vehicles and to extend the safe life-time of the carrying structures. The results presented in the previous works of the author exhibited high performance of supports with an open-loop switching damping policy. In this paper, the goal is to develop a state feedback strategy that is significantly less sensitive to the system parameters and much simpler for practical implementation. Further efforts are put into designing a distributed controller architecture, where only the local and the relevant neighboring states are used to compute the control decisions. The proposed controller is validated experimentally. It exhibits high performance in a wide range of travel speeds. The practicality of the proposed solution should attract the attention of practicing engineers.