Monitoring and restabilizing structures under external excitations through detection and prediction of changes in structural properties

The primary goal of this dissertation is the development of methods for prediction and detection of damage in structures under external excitations through the use of sensors and actuators. The first example involves developing an active flutter suppression algorithm for a flat panel in flight and space vehicles using embedded piezoceramic actuators. A basic eigenvector orientation approach is used to evaluate the possibility of controlling the onset of panel flutter. Eigenvectors for two consecutive modes are usually orthogonal and the onset of flutter condition can be observed earlier as they start to lose their orthogonality. Piezoelectric layers are assumed to be bonded to the top and bottom surfaces of the panel in order to provide counter-bending moments at joints between elements. The controllers are designed to modify the stiffness of the structure and re-stabilize the system; as a result, flutter occurrence can be offset to a higher flutter speed. To illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the developed method, several simple wide beam examples using piezoelectric layers as actuators are studied and presented. Controllers based on different control objectives are considered and the effects of control moment locations are studied. Potential applications of this basic method may be straightforwardly applied to plate and shell structures of laminated composites.; The second example includes developing a method for detecting, locating, and quantifying structural damage using acceleration measurements as feedback. This method directly uses time domain structural vibration measurements and the effects of different damages are decoupled in the controller design. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated with illustrative examples of a three and an eight-story model as well as a single story steel frame model with changes in joint flexibility.; Finally, the progress on developing a hybrid structural health monitoring system is presented through the results on the combined use of the proposed global damage detection algorithm and local infrared imaging for the single bay three-story steel frame with local defect in a beam with channel cross section.