Structural Control: Point of View of a Civil Engineering Company in the Field of Cable-Supported Structures

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“…At the end of the 1990s, the European Union research program Brite-Euram funded a large-scale demonstration project named "ACE", conducted by a consortium involving several academic and industrial partners; this project confirmed the results obtained on smaller test beds [Bossens and Preumont 2001]. However, the selected application of the cable-stayed bridge had a significant drawback: the stay cables had to carry the control loads but also the dead loads, which were substantially larger than the control loads and complicated significantly the design of the active tendons.…”

“…It turns out that cable-structure systems are much easier to control if collocated actuator-sensor pairs are used because this produces alternating poles and zeros in the open-loop transfer function of every channel of the control system [Cannon and Rosenthal 1984;Preumont 2011], drastically reducing the spillover and other problems associated with the high-frequency dynamics. This property was successfully exploited in several studies demonstrating the active damping of cablestayed bridges [Achkire and Preumont 1996;Bossens and Preumont 2001] and guyed space trusses Preumont and Achkire 1997;. All these studies use a decentralized control strategy based on the integral force feedback (IFF) family [Preumont et al 1992].…”

“…At the end of the ACE project, our partner from Bouygues, M. Auperin [Auperin and Dumoulin 2001], suggested that active damping of suspension bridges could be achieved with a very small number of stay cables equipped with active tendons (Figure 1) without the drawback just described for the cable-stayed bridges of having to carry a substantial part of the dead loads. This idea received little attention at the time and was not pursued for lack of funding.…”

Active tendon control of suspension bridges

“…A large scale experiment on a mock-up representative of a cable-stayed bridge (Bossens and Preumont 2001) confirmed the results obtained on smaller test beds, but it pointed out a significant drawback: the stay cables must carry the control loads, but also the dead loads, which are substantially larger than the control loads and complicate significantly the design of the active tendons. However, it was shown by Auperin and Dumoulin (2000) that active damping of suspension bridges could be achieved with a very small number of stay cables equipped with active tendons (Fig. 1), without the drawback just described for the cable-stayed bridges of having to carry a substantial part of the dead loads.…”

An investigation of the active damping of suspension bridges

“…This property was successfully exploited in several studies demonstrating the active damping of cablestayed bridges [Achkire and Preumont 1996;Bossens and Preumont 2001] and guyed space trusses Preumont and Achkire 1997;. All these studies use a decentralized control strategy based on the integral force feedback (IFF) family [Preumont et al 1992].…”