The need for assessing dynamic response of typical industrial piping systems subjected to seismic loading motivated the authors to apply model reduction techniques to experimental dynamic substructuring. Initially, a better insight into the dynamic response of the emulated system was provided by means of the principal component analysis. The clear understanding of reduction basis requirements paved the way for the implementation of a number of model reduction techniques aimed at extending the applicability range of the hybrid testing technique beyond its traditional scope. Therefore, several hybrid simulations were performed on a typical full-scale industrial piping system endowed with a number of critical components, like elbows, Tee joints and bolted flange joints, ranging from operational to collapse limit states. Then, the favourable performance of the L-Stable Real-Time compatible time integrator and an effective delay compensation method were also checked throughout the testing campaign. Finally, several aspects of the piping performance were commented and conclusions drawn.

Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) of a stacked wood shear wall retrofitted with a rate-dependent seismic energy dissipation device (viscous damper) was conducted at the newly constructed Structural Engineering Laboratory at the University of Alabama. This paper describes the implementation process of the RTHS focusing on the controller scheme development. An incremental approach was adopted starting from a controller for the conventional slow pseudodynamic hybrid simulation and evolving to the one applicable for RTHS. Both benchmark-scale and full-scale tests are discussed to provide a roadmap for future RTHS implementation at different laboratories and/or on different structural systems. The developed RTHS controller was applied to study the effect of a rate-dependent energy dissipation device on the seismic performance of a multi-story wood shear wall system. The test specimen, setup, program and results are presented with emphasis given to inter-story drift response. At 100% DBE the RTHS showed that the multi-story shear wall with the damper had 32% less inter-story drift and was noticeably less damaged than its un-damped specimen counterpart.

Substructure shake table testing is a class of real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS). It combines shake table tests of substructures with real-time computational simulation of the remaining part of the structure to assess dynamic response of the entire structure. Unlike in the conventional hybrid simulation, substructure shake table testing imposes acceleration compatibilities at substructure boundaries. However, acceleration tracking of shake tables is extremely challenging, and it is not possible to produce perfect acceleration tracking without time delay. If responses of the experimental substructure have high correlation with ground accelerations, response errors are inevitably induced by the erroneous input acceleration. Feeding the erroneous responses into the RTHS procedure will deteriorate the simulation results. This study presents a set of techniques to enable reliable substructure shake table testing. The developed techniques include compensation techniques for errors induced by imperfect input acceleration of shake tables, model-based actuator delay compensation with state observer, and force correction to eliminate process and measurement noises. These techniques are experimentally investigated through RTHS using a uni-axial shake table and three-story steel frame structure at the Johns Hopkins University. The simulation results showed that substructure shake table testing with the developed compensation techniques provides an accurate and reliable means to simulate the dynamic responses of the entire structure under earthquake excitations.

Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) has emerged as an important tool for testing large and complex structures with a focus on rate-dependent specimen behavior. Due to the real-time constraints, accurate dynamic control of servo-hydraulic actuators is required. These actuators are necessary to realize the desired displacements of the specimen, however they introduce unwanted dynamics into the RTHS loop. Model-based actuator control strategies are based on linearized models of the servo-hydraulic system, where the controller is taken as the model inverse to effectively cancel out the servo-hydraulic dynamics (i.e., model-based feedforward control). An accurate model of a servo-hydraulic system generally contains more poles than zeros, leading to an improper inverse (i.e., more zeros than poles). Rather than introduce additional poles to create a proper inverse controller, the higher order derivatives necessary for implementing the improper inverse can be calculated from available information. The backward-difference method is proposed as an alternative to discretize an improper continuous time model for use as a feedforward controller in RTHS. This method is flexible in that derivatives of any order can be explicitly calculated such that controllers can be developed for models of any order. Using model-based feedforward control with the backward-difference method, accurate actuator control and stable RTHS are demonstrated using a nine-story steel building model implemented with an MR damper.

The unscented Kalman filter (UKF) has been developed for nonlinear model parametric identification, and it assumes that the model parameters are symmetrically distributed about their mean values without any constrains. However, the parameters in many applications are confined within certain ranges to make sense physically. In this paper, a constrained unscented Kalman filter (CUKF) algorithm is proposed to improve accuracy of numerical substructure modeling in hybrid testing. During hybrid testing, the numerical models of numerical substructures which are assumed identical to the physical substructures are updated online with the CUKF approach based on the measurement data from physical substructures. The CUKF method adopts sigma points (i.e., sample points) projecting strategy, with which the positions and weights of sigma points violating constraints are modified. The effectiveness of the proposed hybrid testing method is verified by pure numerical simulation and real-time as well as slower hybrid tests with nonlinear specimens. The results show that the new method has better accuracy compared to conventional hybrid testing with fixed numerical model and hybrid testing based on model updating with UKF.

One of the issues in extending the range of applicable problems of real-time hybrid simulation is the computation speed of the simulator when large-scale computational models with a large number of DOF are used. In this study, functionality of real-time dynamic simulation of MDOF systems is achieved by creating a logic circuit that performs the step-by-step numerical time integration of the equations of motion of the system. The designed logic circuit can be implemented to an FPGA-based system; FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) allows large-scale parallel computing by implementing a number of arithmetic operators within the device. The operator splitting method is used as the numerical time integration scheme. The logic circuit consists of blocks of circuits that perform numerical arithmetic operations that appear in the integration scheme, including addition and multiplication of floating-point numbers, registers to store the intermediate data, and data busses connecting these elements to transmit various information including the floating-point numerical data among them. Case study on several types of linear and nonlinear MDOF system models shows that use of resource sharing in logic synthesis is crucial for effective application of FPGA to real-time dynamic simulation of structural response with time step interval of 1 ms.

This paper presents a user programmable computational/control platform developed to conduct real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS). The architecture of this platform is based on the integration of a real-time controller and a field programmable gate array (FPGA).This not only enables the user to apply user-defined control laws to control the experimental substructures, but also provides ample computational resources to run the integration algorithm and analytical substructure state determination in real-time. In this platform the need for SCRAMNet as the communication device between real-time and servo-control workstations has been eliminated which was a critical component in several former RTHS platforms. The accuracy of the servo-hydraulic actuator displacement control, where the control tasks get executed on the FPGA was verified using single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) and 2 degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) experimental substructures. Finally, the functionality of the proposed system as a robust and reliable RTHS platform for performance evaluation of structural systems was validated by conducting real-time hybrid simulation of a three story nonlinear structure with SDOF and 2DOF experimental substructures. Also, tracking indicators were employed to assess the accuracy of the results.

Real-time dynamic substructuring tests have been conducted on a cable-deck system. The cable is representative of a full scale cable for a cable-stayed bridge and it interacts with a deck, numerically modelled as a single-degree-of-freedom system. The purpose of exciting the inclined cable at the bottom is to identify its nonlinear dynamics and to mark the stability boundary of the semi-trivial solution. The latter physically corresponds to the point at which the cable starts to have an out-of-plane response when both input and previous response were in-plane. The numerical and the physical parts of the system interact through a transfer system, which is an actuator, and the input signal generated by the numerical model is assumed to interact instantaneously with the system. However, only an ideal system manifests a perfect correspondence between the desired signal and the applied signal. In fact, the transfer system introduces into the desired input signal a delay, which considerably affects the feedback force that, in turn, is processed to generate a new input. The effectiveness of the control algorithm is measured by using the synchronization technique, while the online adaptive forward prediction algorithm is used to compensate for the delay error, which is present in the performed tests. The response of the cable interacting with the deck has been experimentally observed, both in the presence of delay and when delay is compensated for, and it has been compared with the analytical model. The effects of the interface delay in real-time dynamic substructuring tests conducted on the cable-deck system are extensively discussed.

Accurate actuator tracking is critical to achieve reliable real-time hybrid simulation results for earthquake engineering research. The frequency-domain evaluation approach provides an innovative way for more quantitative post-simulation evaluation of actuator tracking errors compared with existing time domain based techniques. Utilizing the Fast Fourier Transform the approach analyzes the actuator error in terms of amplitude and phrase errors. Existing application of the approach requires using the complete length of the experimental data. To improve the computational efficiency, two techniques including data decimation and frequency decimation are analyzed to reduce the amount of data involved in the frequency-domain evaluation. The presented study aims to enhance the computational efficiency of the approach in order to utilize it for future on-line actuator tracking evaluation. Both computational simulation and laboratory experimental results are analyzed and recommendations on the two decimation factors are provided based on the findings from this study.

Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) is a promising cyber-physical technique used in the experimental evaluation of civil infrastructure systems subject to dynamic loading. In RTHS, the response of a structural system is simulated by partitioning it into physical and numerical substructures, and coupling at the interface is achieved by enforcing equilibrium and compatibility in real-time. The choice of partitioning parameters will influence the overall success of the experiment. In addition, due to the dynamics of the transfer system, communication and computation delays, the feedback force signals are dependent on the system state subject to delay. Thus, the transfer system dynamics must be accommodated by appropriate actuator controllers. In light of this, guidelines should be established to facilitate successful RTHS and clearly specify: (i) the minimum requirements of the transfer system control, (ii) the minimum required sampling frequency, and (iii) the most effective ways to stabilize an unstable simulation due to the limitations of the available transfer system. The objective of this paper is to establish a stability switch criterion due to systematic experimental errors. The RTHS stability switch criterion will provide a basis for the partitioning and design of successful RTHS.

Real-Time Hybrid Simulation (RTHS) is a novel approach conceived to evaluate dynamic responses of structures with parts of a structure physically tested and the remainder parts numerically modelled. In RTHS, delay estimation is often a precondition of compensation; nonetheless, system delay may vary during testing. Consequently, it is sometimes necessary to measure delay online. Along these lines, this paper proposes an online delay estimation method using least-squares algorithm based on a simplified physical system model, i.e., a pure delay multiplied by a gain reflecting amplitude errors of physical system control. Advantages and disadvantages of different delay estimation methods based on this simplified model are firstly discussed. Subsequently, it introduces the least-squares algorithm in order to render the estimator based on Taylor series more practical yet effective. As a result, relevant parameter choice results to be quite easy. Finally in order to verify performance of the proposed method, numerical simulations and RTHS with a buckling-restrained brace specimen are carried out. Relevant results show that the proposed technique is endowed with good convergence speed and accuracy, even when measurement noises and amplitude errors of actuator control are present.

With the sub-stepping technique, the numerical analysis in real-time dynamic hybrid testing is split into the response analysis and signal generation tasks. Two target computers that operate in real-time may be assigned to implement these two tasks, respectively, for fully extending the simulation scale of the numerical substructure. In this case, the integration time-step of solving the dynamic response of the numerical substructure can be dozens of times bigger than the sampling time-step of the controller. The time delay between the real and desired feedback forces becomes more striking, which challenges the well-developed delay compensation methods in real-time dynamic hybrid testing. This paper focuses on displacement prediction and force correction for delay compensation in the real-time dynamic hybrid testing with a large integration time-step. A new displacement prediction scheme is proposed based on recently-developed explicit integration algorithms and compared with several commonly-used prediction procedures. The evaluation of its prediction accuracy is carried out theoretically, numerically and experimentally. Results indicate that the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed prediction method are of significance.