An Analysis of Pulse Control for Simple Mechanical Systems

An efficient pulse control method for insuring safety of simple mechanical systems is developed and its sensitivity to the excitation frequency content and to various control parameters is studied. The control algorithm, consisting of applying pulse forces in a feedback fashion, is designed to insure that maximum system response is limited to safe values at all times. It is shown that the proposed algorithm is simple to implement and is efficient in controlling peak response in terms of on-line computation and pulse energy required. The technique is illustrated and analyzed for a single-degree-of-freedom linear system.