State and disturbance estimation and disturbance compensation for adaptive high-rises under wind loads

Abstract

This paper presents methods for state and disturbance estimation and disturbance compensation for adaptive high-rise structures subjected to wind loads (disturbances). The proposed methods are experimentally demonstrated on the world’s first adaptive demonstrator high-rise (DHR) at the University of Stuttgart. The state and disturbance estimation (SDE) employs a wind model and reduces the unknown variables to two disturbance parameters. The resulting estimation model is linear, which enables applying Kalman filtering. Filter tuning based on L-curves reveals that the best process-noise values scale with the mean wind speed. As a prerequisite for experiments, a model in modal coordinates of the DHR is identified using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), whereby the influence of different prestress levels of the diagonal-bracings on the modal parameters is analyzed. The control scheme consists of an optimization-based static disturbance rejection (SDR) and an H2 controller for active vibration damping (AVD), both employing available information on the wind loading. Experiments on the DHR with different sensor configurations yield good open- and closed-loop estimation performance. While the SDR performs well in simulations, its experimental benefit is less pronounced, likely due to a very small deflection-to-height ratio and actuator force-tracking limitations. The AVD performs well in experiments and reduces the oscillation amplitudes by about 60 %.