Investigation on acceleration performance improvement of electro-hydraulic shake tables using parametric feedforward compensator and functional link adaptive controller.

Electro-hydraulic shake table (EHST), also known as earthquake simulator, is of considerable significance in civil engineering for evaluating structures or infrastructures subjected to earthquake ground motions. However, reproduction of prescribed accelerations at table for EHST systems remains to be imperfect as the whole systems are confronted with hydraulic nonlinearity, varying dynamics, unexpected disturbance, etc. For enhancing the acceleration tracking performance of EHST systems, an acceleration waveform reproduction strategy using offline designed parametric feedforward compensator (PFC) and online functional link adaptive controller (FLAC) is proposed in this paper. The PFC controller is established on the basis of classical three variable controller (TVC) as an inner compensation loop, in which multi-innovation forgetting gradient (MIFG) algorithm together with zero magnitude error tracking (ZMET) technique are utilized during the design process. The FLAC controller is combined to the PFC controller as an outer loop for further acceleration enhancement purpose, and the controller's nonlinear mapping ability is achieved with trigonometric expansion implementation. Following theoretical analysis of the proposed controller, comparative experiments are performed on an established unidirectional EHST test bench with both random and real-time recorded earthquake input waveforms. The experimental results validate the feasibility and superiority of the proposed acceleration reproduction strategy.