Integration of health monitoring and vibration control for smart building structures with time-varying structural parameters and unknown excitations

When a building structure requires both health monitoring system and vibration control system, integrating the two systems together will be cost-effective and beneficial for creating a smart building structure with its own sensors (nervous system), processors (brain system), and actuators (muscular system). This paper presents a real-time integrated procedure to demonstrate how health monitoring and vibration control can be integrated in real time to accurately identify time-varying structural parameters and unknown excitations on one hand, and to optimally mitigate excessive vibration of the building structure on the other hand. The basic equations for the identification of time-varying structural parameters and unknown excitations of a semi-active damper-controlled building structure are first presented. The basic equations for semi-active vibration control of the building structure with time-varying structural parameters and unknown excitations are then put forward. The numerical algorithm is finally followed to show how the identification and the control can be performed simultaneously. The results from the numerical investigation of an example building demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible and accurate.