Active Control of Shallow,Slack Cable Using the Parametric Control of End Tension

This study presents a practical, fieldable active controller applicable to shallow, slack cables. The controller is based upon an underlying theory that does not assume that the inertial forces are negligible in the direction of the cable chord. The theoretical framework is developed, and an experimental verification is presented. The experiments utilized a TV camera to track a small number of LED targets on the controlled cable, a commercial X-Y tracker and a PC to compute the cable's present position and velocity, and a linear actuator to vary the cable's tension. A Kalman filter was employed to smooth the position estimates and provide least-squares estimates of the cable velocity. The stability limits for the phase and amplitude of the control signal were established. An analytical estimate of the induced damping expected from the control algorithm is derived. Experimental measurements of the cable frequency and induced damping compared well with theoretical predictions. It is shown that he proposed active control approach is a simple, reliable, as well as an effective, method for vibration attenuation in lightly damped, shallow, slack cables.