Active vibration control for high‐rise buildings using displacement measurements by image processing

This study aims to develop a high‐performance active mass damper (AMD) for super high‐rise buildings with a low natural frequency. Conventional AMDs utilize accelerometers to control vibration. However, those AMDs cannot sufficiently damp the vibration because the accelerometer sensitivity is low in a low‐frequency band (e.g., the natural frequency of high‐rise buildings). Under these circumstances, this study proposes the measurement of vibration displacements using cameras and an image processing technique, called template matching, instead of accelerometers. The measurement accuracy in the low‐frequency band was evaluated by comparison to that of the accelerometer. The results indicate that the proposed method achieved a higher measurement accuracy compared to the accelerometers in the low‐frequency band. One problem when applying the displacement measurement using image processing to the vibration control is time delay with calculation. We solved this problem using the Padé approximation. Finally, real‐time hybrid tests attained with a combination of real‐time simulation and experiment were conducted. The results confirmed that the proposed method reduced the first resonance peak value by 24% in the low‐frequency band compared with the accelerometers. In addition, it can prevent the degradation of the vibration damping performance of the higher vibration modes (i.e., spillover phenomena) caused by acceleration control. The proposed method contributes to the development of a novel AMD that suppresses the shaking of super high‐rise buildings.