Structural control has been comprehensively studied over the world as a multidisciplinary research field. The present work is motivated by an attempt to give a common frame to the recent research and applications of structural control technology in civil engineering across Europe. They include novel passive dampers, functional materials and semi‐active dampers, active control systems, and their performance investigations. Design methods for the vibrations reduction of buildings, bridges, and wind turbines are discussed with reference to case studies. Control algorithms and dimension reduction techniques are also studied. Adaptation strategies and techniques based on the potential offered by piezoelectricity are reviewed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper considers a hybrid seismic control system for building structures, which combines a class of passive nonlinear base isolator with an active control system. The objective of the active component is to keep the base displacement relative to the ground, the interstory drift and the absolute acceleration within appropriate ranges. The base isolator device exhibits a hysteretic nonlinear behavior which is described by the Bouc-Wen model. The adaptive backstepping approach is used for the control design in order to cope with the nonlinearity and the presence of uncertainties. The control problem is formulated with representations of the system dynamics using two alternative coordinate sets: absolute (with respect to an inertial frame) and relative to the ground. A comparison between the two strategies is presented by means of numerical simulations.

The paper presents results for the second moment stability of continuous-time Markov jump systems with quadratic terms, aiming for engineering applications. Quadratic terms stem from physical constraints in applications, as in electronic circuits based on resistor (R), inductor (L), and capacitor (C). In the paper, an RLC circuit supplied a load driven by jumps produced by a Markov chain—the RLC circuit used sensors that measured the quadratic of electrical currents and voltages. Our result was then used to design a stabilizing controller for the RLC circuit with measurements based on that quadratic terms. The experimental data confirm the usefulness of our approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

This paper shows the construction of a low-cost, open-source mechanical ventilator. The motivation for constructing this kind of ventilator comes from the worldwide shortage of mechanical ventilators for treating COVID-19 patients—the COVID-19 pandemic has been striking hard in some regions, especially the deprived ones. Constructing a low-cost, open-source mechanical ventilator aims to mitigate the effects of this shortage on those regions. The equipment documented here employs commercial spare parts only. This paper also shows a numerical method for monitoring the patients’ pulmonary condition. The method considers pressure measurements from the inspiratory limb and alerts clinicians in real-time whether the patient is under a healthy or unhealthy situation. Experiments carried out in the laboratory that had emulated healthy and unhealthy patients illustrate the potential benefits of the derived mechanical ventilator.

The problem of designing a decentralised control scheme for a class of linear large scale interconnected systems with norm-bounded time-varying parameter uncertainties under a class of control failures is addressed. These failures are described by a model that considers possible outages or partial failures in every single actuator of each decentralised controller. The control design is performed through two steps. First, a decentralised reliable guaranteed cost control set is derived and, second, a feasible linear matrix inequalities procedure is presented for the effective construction of the control set. A numerical example illustrates the efficiency of the proposed control scheme.