Observer and Controller Design for Vibration Suppression of a Structure with MR Brakes as Nonlinear Hinges

Due to the demands of experiment on cost and repeatability, the model of nonlinear vibration of structures is difficult to establish. In this paper, an MR rotary brake was used to substitute the plastic hinge of a structure to simulate nonlinear behavior. Different nonlinear behaviors were achieved by changing the MR rotary damper's input voltage. In order to verify the performance of the intelligent algorithms presented before, a magnetorheological (MR) damper was incorporated to the nonlinear model. Adaptive fuzzy sliding mode control was applied to the MR damper using dynamic neural network as the state observer. Experimental data shows that the proposed nonlinear model can be tested repeatedly without much effort. Furthermore, through the different nonlinear case experimental results, it is proved that the intelligent control algorithm is very suitable for control of nonlinear structural vibration.