High-fidelity control of a seismic shake table

A high-fidelity PC-based control system has been developed to improve the t racking characteristics of a small-scale seismic motion simulator used for testing structural control designs. This work outlines the development and testing of the control system. First, the simulator hardware is described i n detail. The process of constructing a mechanistic model of the system and identifying model parameters is then described, Next, a closed-loop feedba ck/feed-forward control algorithm, based on an optimal receding horizon for mulation, is developed. The control design was tested and the results indic ate that the seismic shake table precisely tracked reference seismic motion s, Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.