Spillover Prevention via Proper Synthesis/Placement of Actuators and Sensors

A central problem in the control of lightly damped, flexible large space structures is control and observation spillover of reduced-order controllers which can produce destabilizing interactions with unmodeled modes of vibration. Techniques for preventing control spillover by proper synthesis of the influences of existent actuators on a structure and by proper initial placement of the actuators are applied to two representative numerical models of large space structures. This paper focuses on control spillover, because these techniques can be dualized for the prevention of observation spillover. For both models synthesis is shown to prevent control spillover to a significant number of unmodeled modes of vibration. The synthesis algorithm is also extended to determine how actuators should be placed on these models initially for total spillover prevention.