Seminar: Dynamic Hyperspaces for Enhanced Applicability of Structural Control
Speaker: Simon Laflamme, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University
Date: October 31, 2011
Time: 1:10 p.m.
Location: 3043 ECpE Building Addition
Abstract: An effective mitigation strategy for structural systems subjected to natural (e.g., wind and earthquake loads) and manmade (e.g., blast) hazards is to include structural control mechanisms. Despite the advancements of this technology, broad implementation of structural control mechanisms for effective structural hazard mitigation is rare. In the seminar, fundamental control issues impeding the applicability of structural control will be discussed. Those include large parametric uncertainties, limited sensing, unavailability of input-output data sets, and immediate performance requirements. To address the problem, a new type of controllers is proposed. It consists of control representations with adaptive hyperspaces, for which the inputs are selected sequentially and online. Large-scale simulations on an existing structure located in Boston, Mass., show the substantial performance of control representations with dynamic hyperspaces over those with static hyperspaces.
Speaker bio: Simon Laflamme recently joined the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor. He received a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Engineering both from McGill, and an M.Eng. in high-performance structures as well as a Ph.D. in Structures and Materials from MIT. His research interests include intelligent and adaptive systems, structural control, structural health monitoring, and nonlinear time series.