Active disturbance rejection control for structural vibration

Construction vibration is a fast responding, multivariable coupled dynamic system. In this paper, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) solution is proposed and tested on a certain three-storey building model. The proposed system with a decentralized structure is free from complex decoupling which is hard to practice in actual application. Under ADRC framework, the influence of the entanglement between two control loops, the un-modeled, the higher order dynamics and the uncertainties are regarded as a single combined general disturbance, which could be actively compensated by the controller with the information obtained from the Extended State Observer(ESO). The simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy could attenuate structural vibration effectively when actual earthquake signal is added into the system. Since ADRC method is model free, strong controller robustness is well secured, and a single set of parameters is adequate in various situations. Due to the advantages in disturbance-rejection and structure simplicity and tuning easiness, ADRC provides an simple, practical alternative solution for structural vibration control in both earthquake and industrial application.