State and disturbance estimation and disturbance compensation for adaptive high-rises under wind loads

This paper presents methods for state and disturbance estimation and disturbance compensation for adaptive high-rise structures subjected to wind loads (disturbances). The proposed methods are experimentally demonstrated on the world’s first adaptive demonstrator high-rise (DHR) at the University of Stuttgart. The state and disturbance estimation (SDE) employs a wind model and reduces the unknown variables to two disturbance parameters. The resulting estimation model is linear, which enables applying Kalman filtering. Filter tuning based on L-curves reveals that the best process-noise values scale with the mean wind speed. As a prerequisite for experiments, a model in modal coordinates of the DHR is identified using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), whereby the influence of different prestress levels of the diagonal-bracings on the modal parameters is analyzed. The control scheme consists of an optimization-based static disturbance rejection (SDR) and an H 2 controller for active vibration damping (AVD), both employing available information on the wind loading. Experiments on the DHR with different sensor configurations yield good open- and closed-loop estimation performance. While the SDR performs well in simulations, its experimental benefit is less pronounced, likely due to a very small deflection-to-height ratio and actuator force-tracking limitations. The AVD performs well in experiments and reduces the oscillation amplitudes by about 60 %.