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In many applications, kinematic structures are used to enable and disable degrees of freedom. The relative movement between a wheel and the body of a car or a landing gear and an aircraft fuselage are examples for a defined movement. In most cases, a spring-damper system determines the kinetic properties of the movement. However, unexpected high load peaks may lead to maximum displacements and maybe to locking. Thus, a hard clash between two rigid components may occur, causing acceleration peaks. This may have harmful effects for the whole system. For example a hard landing of an aircraft can result in locking the landing gear and thus damage the entire aircraft. In this paper, the potential of adaptive auxiliary kinematic guidance elements in a spring-damper system to prevent locking is investigated numerically. The aim is to provide additional forces in the auxiliary kinematic guidance elements in case of overloading the spring-damper system and thus to absorb some of the impact energy. To estimate the potential of the load redistribution in the spring-damper system, a numerical model of a two-mass oscillator is used, similar to a quarter-car-model. In numerical calculations, the reduction of the acceleration peaks of the masses with the adaptive approach is compared to the Acceleration peaks without the approach, or, respectively, when locking is not prevented. In addition, the required force of the adaptive auxiliary kinematic guidance elements is calculated as a function of the masses of the system and the drop height, or, respectively, the impact energy.

Buckling of axially loaded beam-columns represents a critical design constraint for light-weight structures. Besides passive solutions to increase the critical buckling load, active buckling control provides a possibility to stabilize slender elements in structures. So far, buckling control by active forces or bending moments has been mostly investigated for beam-columns with rectangular cross-section and with a preferred direction of buckling. The proposed approach investigates active buckling control of a beam-column with circular solid cross-section which is fixed at its base and pinned at its upper end. Three controlled active lateral forces are applied near the fixed base with angles of 120° to each other to stabilize the beam-column and allow higher critical axial loads. The beam-column is subject to supercritical static axial loads and lateral disturbance forces with varying directions and offsets. Two independent modal state space systems are derived for the bending planes in the lateral y- and z-directions of the circular cross-section. These are used to design two linear-quadratic regulators (LQR) that determine the necessary control forces which are transformed into the directions of the active lateral forces. The system behavior is simulated with a finite element model using one-dimensional beam elements with six degrees of freedom at each node. With the implemented control, it is possible to actively stabilize a beam-column with circular cross-section in arbitrary buckling direction for axial loads significantly above the critical axial buckling load.

Buckling is an important design constraint in light-weight structures as it may result in the collapse of an entire structure. When a mechanical beam column is loaded above its critical buckling load, it may buckle. In addition, if the actual loading is not fully known, stability becomes highly uncertain. To control uncertainty in buckling, an approach is presented to actively stabilise a slender flat column sensitive to buckling. For this purpose, actively controlled forces applied by piezoelectric actuators located close to the column's clamped base stabilise the column against buckling at critical loading. In order to design a controller to stabilise the column, a mathematical model of the postcritically loaded system is needed. Simulating postbuckling behaviour is important to study the effect of axial loads above the critical axial buckling load within active buckling control. Within this postbuckling model, different kinds of uncertainty may occur: i) error in estimation of model parameters such as mass, damping and stiffness, ii) non-linearities e. g. in the assumption of curvature of the column's deflection shapes and many more. In this paper, numerical simulations based on the mathematical model for the postcritically axially loaded column are compared to a mathematical model based on experiments of the actively stabilised postcritically loaded real column system using closed loop identification. The motivation to develop an experimentally validated mathematical model is to develop of a model based stabilising control algorithm for a real postcritically axially loaded beam column.

This paper gives a general view on some aspects of the influence of uncertainty in model-based monitoring of loadcarrying structures. The advantages and relevance of monitoring for the prediction of reliability will be clarified and the difference between uncertainty and reliability is discussed. Solving inverse Problems is a particular challenge in monitoring systems. Therefore, different categories of inverse problems are discussed. A generally valid extended difference equation, which describes the transfer behavior of the structure, will be derived as the basis for digital signal processing of model-based monitoring. This equation also considers changes in the structures dynamic properties, e.g due to damage or temperature. With this equation, the influence of uncertainty due to measurement noise to the functionability of monitoring is discussed and some possibilities are shown to control this uncertainty when determining ideal sensor-positions for monitoring.