Robust control of hysteretic base-isolated structures under seismic disturbances

The main objective of applying robust active control to base-isolated structures is to protect them in the event of an earthquake. Taking advantage of discontinuous control theory, a static discontinuous active control is developed using as a feedback only the measure of the velocity at the base. Moreover, due to that in many engineering applications, accelerometers are the only devices that provide information available for feedback, our velocity feedback controller could be easily extended by using just acceleration information through a filter. The main contributions of this paper are: (a) a static velocity feedback controller design, and (b) a dynamic acceleration feedback controller design, for seismic attenuation of structures. Robustness performance is analyzed by means of numerical experiments using the 1940 El Centro earthquake.