Saturated modal cost analysis applied to the control of a flexible structure

In recent years many research workers have tackled the problem of designing control systems for use on flexible structures. Due to the very large order (typically from 6^th order to 200^th order) of available models of these structures, a reduced order model is often used when designing such a control system. In this paper a method for producing such a reduced order model is presented. The first section describes the experimental flexible beam built and housed at the Royal Military College of Science (RMCS). The second section describes conventional model cost analysis (MCA) and is illustrated with an example applied to the RMCS flexible beam. The final section describes the new saturated MCA technique and is also illustrated with an example applied to the RMCS flexible beam