STRUCTURAL CONTROL EXPERIMENTS USING AN H-INFINITY POWER FLOW APPROACH

Experimental results are presented comparing velocity feedback with a new technique for designing guaranteed stable control laws for uncertain, modally dense structures with collocated sensors and actuators. A de-reverberated mobility model is used, which is similar in many respects to a wave-based model, but can treat more general structures. The power dissipated by the controller can be maximized in either an H2 or an H∞ sense. The H∞ approach guarantees that the controller is positive real, and thus that the system will remain stable for any uncertainty, provided that the power flow is correctly modelled. The experimental results indicate that the controllers designed with this approach are much more effective than simple collocated rate feedback. © 1991.