Dynamics and Control of Large Mechanical Structors

The inerter is a new passive mechanical device whose use has been pioneered for suspension systems in the Formula One Industry. There is interest to apply such methods to large systems e.g. earthquake damage mitigation in tall buildings, space tethers, railway suspensions. The motivation for this project is the control vibration in very long high aspect ratio drillstrings, which cause costly damage to mechanical and electronic components of the drillstring. The research seeks both a general famework to apply advances mechanical control methods to such problems and specific solutions for the motivating example. Opportunities exist for experiments testing of promising methods resulting from the research. The project falls under the control engineering EPSRC research area and has many common elements with other areas: complex dynamics, modelling of nonlinear effects, implementation constraints for control solutions.