Integrated cable vibration control system using Arduino

The number of cable-stayed bridges has been increasing worldwide, causing issues in maintaining the structural safety and integrity of bridges. The stay cable, one of the most critical members in cable-stayed bridges, is vulnerable to wind-induced vibrations owing to its inherent low damping capacity. Thus, vibration mitigation of stay cables has been an important issue both in academia and practice. While a semi-active control scheme shows effective vibration reduction compared to a passive control scheme, real-world applications are quite limited because it requires complicated equipment, including for data acquisition, and power supply. This study aims to develop an Arduino-based integrated cable vibration control system implementing a semi-active control algorithm. The integrated control system is built on the low-cost, low-power Arduino platform, embedding a semi-active control algorithm. A MEMS accelerometer is installed in the platform to conduct a state feedback for the semi-active control. The Linear Quadratic Gaussian control is applied to estimate a cable state and obtain a control gain, and the clipped optimal algorithm is implemented to control the damping device. This study selects the magnetorheological damper as a semi-active damping device, controlled by the proposed control system. The developed integrated system is applied to a laboratory size cable with a series of experimental studies for identifying the effect of the system on cable vibration reduction. The semi-active control embedded in the integrated system is compared with free and passive mode cases and is shown to reduce the vibration of stay-cables effectively.