Advances in Shake Table Control and Substructure Shake Table Testing
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Date
2014-06-18
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Shake table tests provide a true representation of seismic phenomena including a fully dynamic environment with base excitation of the test structure. For this reason shake tables have become a staple in many earthquake engineering laboratories. While shake tables are widely used for research and commercial applications, further developments in shake table techniques will allow researchers to use shake tables in a broader range of studies. This dissertation presents recent advances in the use of shake tables for the seismic performance evaluation of civil engineering structures. Developments include theoretical and experimental investigations of substructure shake table testing, a technique where the entire test structure is separated into computational and experimental substructures. Challenges in meeting the boundary conditions between the substructures have limited the number of implementations of substructure shake table testing to date; thus in this dissertation, appropriate methods of addressing the boundary conditions between experimental and computational substructures are presented and evaluated. Also, a novel strategy for acceleration control of shake tables is presented to enhance the acceleration tracking performance of shake tables to be used in substructure shake table testing. Results are presented that show the promise in using the developed techniques over traditional shake table testing methods.
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Keywords
Earthquake Engineering, Shake Table, Real-Time Hybrid Simulation, Feedback Control