Reconfiguration Strategy for Fault-Tolerant Control of High-Rise Adaptive Structures

Adaptive structures comprise sensors, a control unit as well as actuators and are able to actively counteract to external disturbances. However, an actuator failure can lead to a significant performance degradation, which can be reduced by designing a reconfigurable control law. In this letter, a fault-tolerant controller for an adaptive high-rise structure is designed, which is able to adapt to multiple actuator failures and thus is an important step for the automation of adaptive structures. The proposed control law consists of two parts - a static offset compensation, which counteracts the constant force applied by the faulty actuators on the mechanical structure, and a reconfigurable linear quadratic regulator, which optimally minimizes the vibrations of the structure using the remaining functioning actuators. The introduced approach is evaluated in a simulation study considering a wind disturbance. As a result the fault tolerant control scheme ensures a more efficient energy operation and yields a performance improvement of up to 33% compared to a nominal controller. Consequently, the reliability of adaptive structures is increased.