Heon-Jae Lee

Feasibility study of an MR damper-based smart passive control system employing an electromagnetic induction device

The feasibility of a newly developed smart passive control system equipped electromagnetic induction device is experimentally investigated. An electromagnetic induction device consists of a permanent magnet and a solenoid, which produces electrical energy (i.e. induced current) according to Faradays law of electromagnetic induction. The produced energy is applied to the magnetorheological (i.e. MR) damper to change the damping characteristics by itself without any controller or corresponding sensors for reducing structural responses. Recently, the smart passive control system was conceptually and numerically introduced without consideration of its practical applicability. This paper describes the design of an electromagnetic inductive device which is composed of a permanent magnet and a solenoid, and experiments with the MR damper-based smart passive control system on a shaking table which produces various sinusoidal and random excitations. The experimental results demonstrate that it is feasible to apply the smart passive control system equipped electromagnetic induction device for changing the damping characteristics of an MR damper.

Modified Energy Dissipation Algorithm for Seismic Structures Using Magnetorheological Damper

A simple modified energy dissipation algorithm is presented for seismic response reduction. The magnetorheological (MR) damper, an efficient semiactive device is controlled using a maximum energy dissipation algorithm (MEDA), as well as a newly proposed modified variable energy dissipation algorithm (VEDA) that supplies continuously varying command voltages. For MEDA, the command voltage is either zero or the maximum value. In some situations when the dominant frequencies of the system under control are low, large changes in the forces applied to the structure may result in high local acceleration values. The VEDA is proposed as a modification to the original MEDA to reduce this effect. Also the applicability of the VEDA-based semiactive control system using MR dampers is investigated through numerical simulation of a three-story shear building.

An Experimental Study of Semiactive Modal Neuro-control Scheme Using MR Damper for Building Structure

In this study, a semiactive modal neuro-control scheme which combines the modal neuro-control algorithm with a semiactive MR damper is proposed, and its effectiveness is experimentally verified through a series of shaking table tests. A modal neuro-control scheme uses modal coordinates as inputs of neuro-controller. Hence, it is more convenient to design the controller compared with conventional neuro-control schemes. A Kalman filter is introduced to estimate modal states from measurements. Moreover, the clipped algorithm is adopted to provide an appropriate command voltage to an MR damper. For shaking table tests, a scaled three-story shear building model is considered. Two types of semiactive modal neuro-controllers are trained with a reproduced El Centro earthquake for their own purposes. The performance of the proposed semiactive modal neuro-control scheme is compared with that of the passive-optimal case. In the experiments, the proposed semiactive modal neuro-controllers show better performance than the passive-optimal case, especially in adaptability over various excitations and reducing inter-story drifts as well as accelerations. Moreover, the proposed scheme can be designed for specific purpose which fulfills the designers requirement (e.g., focusing on reducing inter-story drifts). Therefore, the proposed semiactive modal neuro-controller can be effectively used in reducing seismic responses of large engineering structures.

Integrated design method of MR damper and electromagnetic induction system for structural control

Magnetorheological (MR) dampers are one of the most advantageous control devices for civil engineering applications to natural hazard mitigation due to many good features such as small power requirement, reliability, and low price to manufacture. To reduce the responses of a structural system by using MR dampers, a control system including a power supply, control algorithm, and sensors is needed. The control system becomes complex, however, when a lot of MR dampers are applied to large-scale civil structures, such as cable-stayed bridges and high-rise buildings. Thus, it is difficult to install and/or maintain the MR damper-based control system. To overcome the above difficulties, a smart passive system was proposed, which is based on an MR damper system. The smart passive system consists of an MR damper and an electromagnetic induction (EMI) system that uses a permanent magnet and a coil. According to the Faraday law of induction, the EMI system that is attached to the MR damper can produce electric energy and the produced energy is applied to the MR damper to vary the damping characteristics of the damper. Thus, the smart passive system does not require any power at all. Besides the output of electric energy is proportional to input loads such as earthquakes, which means the smart passive system has adaptability by itself without any controller or sensors. In this paper, the integrated design method of a large-scale MR damper and Electromagnetic Induction (EMI) system is presented. Since the force of an MR damper is controllable by altering the input current generated from an EMI part, it is necessary to design an MR damper and an EMI part simultaneously. To do this, design parameters of an EMI part consisting of permanent magnet and coil as well as those of an MR damper consisting of a hydraulic-type cylinder and a magnetic circuit that controls the magnetic flux density in a fluid-flow path are considered in the integrated design procedure. As an example, a smart passive control system for reducing stay cable responses is considered in this investigation and it will be fabricated and tested through experiment in the future.

Performance Evaluation of a Large-scale MR Damper for Controlling Seismic Responses Using a Real-time Hybrid Test Method

This paper presents real-time hybrid test method of large-scale MR damper applied to a building structure under seismic excitation. The real-time hybrid test using an actuator for the control performance evaluation of a MR damper controlling the response of earthquake-excited building structure is experimentally implemented. In the test, the building structure is used as a numerical part, on which a large-scale MR damper adopted as an experimental part was installed to reduce its response. At first, the force that is acting between a MR damper and building structure is measured from the load cell attached on the actuator system and is fed-back to the computer to control the motion of the actuator. Then, the actuator is so driven that the error between the interface displacement computed from the numerical building structure with the excitations of earthquake and the fed-back interface force and that measured from the actuator. The control efficiency of the MR damper used in this paper is experimentally confirmed by implementing this process of experiment on real-time.

Performance Evaluation of Decentralized Control Algorithm of a Full-scale 5-story Structure Installed with Semi-active MR Damper Excited by Seismic Load

In this study, seismic response control performance of decentralized response-dependent MR damper which generates the control force using only the response of damper-installed floor, was experimentally investigated through the tests of a full-scale structure installed with large MR dampers. The performance of the decentralized control algorithm was compared to those of the centralized ones such as Lyapunov, modulated homogeneous friction, and clipped-optimal control. Hybrid mass damper were controlled to induce seismic response of the full-scale structure under El Centro earthquake. Experimental results indicated that the proposed decentralized MR damper provided superior or equivalent performance to centralized one in spite of using damper-installed floor response for calculating input voltage to MR damper.

Large-scale Smart Passive System for Civil Engineering Applications

The smart passive system consisting of a magnetorheological (MR) damper and an electromagnetic induction (EMI) part has been recently proposed. An EMI part can generate the input current for an MR damper from vibration of a structure according to Faradays law of electromagnetic induction. The control performance of the smart passive system has been demonstrated mainly by numerical simulations. It was verified from the numerical results that the system could be effective to reduce the structural responses in the cases of civil engineering structures such as buildings and bridges. On the other hand, the experimental validation of the system is not sufficiently conducted yet. In this paper, the feasibility of the smart passive system to real-scale structures is investigated. To do this, the large-scale smart passive system is designed, manufactured, and tested. The system consists of the large-capacity MR damper, which has a maximum force level of approximately ±10,000N, a maximum stroke level of ±35mm and the maximum current level of 3 A, and the large-scale EMI part, which is designed to generate sufficient induced current for the damper. The applicability of the smart passive system to large real-scale structures is examined through a series of shaking table tests. The magnitudes of the induced current of the EMI part with various sinusoidal excitation inputs are measured. According to the test results, the large-scale EMI part shows the possibility that it could generate the sufficient current or power for changing the damping characteristics of the large-capacity MR damper.

Semiactive Control System Based on MR Damper for Suppressing Vibration of Stay Cable under Wind Load

This paper investigates the performance of the semiactive control system based on magnetorheological fluid (MR) dampers for suppressing excessive vibration of stay cable installed in cable-stayed bridges under wind load. The cable model is extracted from a 156.3 m long stay cable with high tension. The external wind load is generated from the widely used wind load spectrum such as the Kaimal spectrum. Several semiactive control algorithms such as the Lyapunov stability theory-based control, the maximum energy dissipation and the clipped-optimal control are considered to find the appropriate control strategy for the cable-damper system employing MR dampers. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the semiactive control systems based on MR dampers and their control performances are compared with those of passively operated control systems.