EACS 2016 paper - Fuzzy Control of Three-Degree-of-Freedom Systems using Multiple MR Dampers

Smart structural control is now emerging as an alternative to conventional earthquake resistant design and traditional structural control techniques. Fuzzy control is one of the promising control strategies that could be used for this function. Magnetorheological (MR) dampers are considered one of the promising semi-active control devices that can be used to control the structural response of buildings under earthquake excitation. The properties of MR dampers can be controlled using several control techniques such as Fuzzy Logic.
In this paper, a fuzzy control scheme is proposed to control the response of a three degree of freedom system under earthquake excitation. The system is equipped with three MR dampers with one for each degree of freedom, i.e., floor. The system comprises an optimization component which identifies the most optimum firing sequence of the MR dampers in order to achieve the best controlled response. It is envisaged that not all three MR dampers are fired simultaneously; only selected ones are fired as per the decision of the optimization scheme. A comparative analysis is, finally, conducted in order to demonstrate the validity of the proposed scheme.