Structural health condition assessment of structures coupled with optimal control mechanisms

The health conditions of any important structure require monitoring and assessment due to its importance that serves crucial purpose to the economy and development of the society. Often, it is not possible to build such structures whenever it is needed due to underlying feasibility, economic benefits as well as for many societal factors. Hence, it is undoubtably vital to keep them healthy and monitor their health conditions constantly. There is an obvious question of the worthiness of the assessment and continuous monitoring of those structures, not only because of monitory issues but also the complicacy of the holistic monitoring process. And things get more complicated when structures are equipped with smart control systems. Therefore, it is essential to understand the physics of the underlying structures itself as well as the mechanics of the control technologies. The performance of the structure is significantly affected by the efficiency of the connected control systems. To deal with the early mentioned issue, this study investigates the healthy and damaged conditions of the uncontrolled and controlled structures. To do this end, the simulations are conducted by considering a multi-degree-of-freedom structure. And the performances are intra-compared between three scenarios: (i) total healthy structure, (ii) healthy structure equipped with an active control device, and (iii) damaged structure equipped with an active control device. In the first instance, the basic dynamic properties such as resonant frequencies, mode shapes are compared. Further, more advanced analyses are performed and the performances are evaluated both in time and frequency domain. The outcome shows that the studied scenarios are very effective to assess the overall conditions of the structures.