Abstract
To achieve the lightweight and robust design of a structure, it is requested to design a structure and its control system simultaneously, which is called as the combined optimal design. A constant-cross-sectional area cantilever beam was chosen as an example for the applying the optimum design method. An initial load and a time varying disturbance were applied at the free end of the beam. Sliding mode control was selected due to its insensitiveness to the disturbance compared with other modes. It is known that the sliding mode control is robust to the disturbance and the uncertainty only if a matching condition is met, after giving a switching hyper plane. In this study, the optimum method was used for the design of the switching hyper plane and the objective function of the optimum switching hyper plane was assumed to be the objective one of the control system. The total weight of the structure was treated as a constraint and the cross sectional areas of the beam were considered as design variables, which means a nonlinear programming problem. The sequential linear programming method was applied to solve it. As a result of the optimum design, the effect of attenuating vibrations has been improved obviously. Moreover, lightweight design of the structure became possible from the relationship of the weight of the structure and the control objective function.
