Abstract

Abstract
In this paper it is described a hardware experimental setup applied to study the response of structures due to an earthquake excitation. The described hardware experimental setup was applied in the performance and effectiveness evaluation of passive and semi-active vibration control strategies, in order to reduce the structural response due to an earthquake excitation. This study is also meant to validate the accurateness of the developed numerical models that simulate the experimental results. The hardware implementation is described, being the structural response real data and its numerical models compared.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
In this paper a small-signal and noise modeling approach is developed and applied to GaN HEMTs. The main advantage of the proposed method is its simplicity and dependency on only pinch-off S-parameter measurements. The achieved model shows good fitting with microwave experiments performed on nonlinear solid-state devices with different sizes. The model reliability is further confirmed by the observed scaling of the extracted parameters.

Abstract
This work addresses the problem of finding the best controller parameters in order to improve the response of a single degree-of-freedom structural system under earthquake excitation. The control paradigm considered is based on brain emotional learning (BEL) and the actuation over the building dynamics is carried out by changing the stiffness of a magneto-rheological damper. A typical BEL-based controller requires the definition of several parameters which can prove difficult and non-intuitive to obtain. For this reason, an evolutionary-based search technique has been added to the current problem framework in order to automate the controller design. In particular, the particle swarm optimization method is chosen as the evolutionary based technique to be integrated within the current control paradigm. The obtained results suggest that, indeed, it is possible to parametrize a BEL controller using an evolutionary-based algorithm. Moreover, a simulation shows that the obtained results can outperform the ones obtained by manual tuning each controller parameter individually.