Nonlinear substructuring control for simultaneous control of acceleration and displacement in shake table substructuring experiments

This paper reports the first application of nonlinear substructuring control (NLSC) to shake table experiments in which the table dynamics is significantly affected by the specimen. Substructuring experiments using a shake table require simultaneous control of acceleration and displacement of the table because it functions as both an actuation system and a part of the substructure in the experiments. NLSC was developed as an enhanced version of linear substructuring control (LSC), the basic method for the control of dynamically substructured system. This paper first describes the formulation of substructures for shake table experiments using a multiple-degree-of-freedom structure and NLSC design for the substructures. The stability analysis of NLSC, which has three controllers, becomes much more complicated, more frequently showing conditional stability than is observed in conventional experiments. To assess various conditionally stable systems, this paper proposes an equivalent approach that can systematically count encirclements of the critical point in Nyquist plots. In the stability analysis using the proposed approach, NLSC is more robust against parameter variations in the substructures than LSC. In addition, the error feedback controller in both LSC and NLSC enhances the robustness against the variations. This study numerically and experimentally examined control performances for shake table substructuring experiments involving nonlinear characteristics. In the examinations, NLSC achieved the expected displacement and acceleration control with stability and reasonable accuracy, whereas LSC could not. The error feedback controller design of NLSC was found to be essential for performing shake table substructuring experiments with severe nonlinear characteristics.