Control of Buildings under Earthquake Excitation

This paper shows a method of controlling civil engineering structures under earthquake excitation. The approach taken is to augment the equations of motion for the structural system with an appropriate model of the earthquake excitation based on filtering a Gaussian white noise process. In addition to a feedback loop, the controller utilizes the earthquake acceleration measurements for a feedforward compensation. Results are given which indicate that the proposed method offers advantages in performance over the control method employing only state feedback. It is also shown that the nonstationarity in the earthquake excitation can often be neglected in practical design of linear systems. Finally, a discussion is given of how the method might be coupled with equivalent linearization techniques and extended for use with nonlinear structures.