• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.253-259
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• 2018

Structure behaviors resulting from an earthquake are experimentally simulated mainly through a shaking table test. As for large-scale structures, however, size effects over a miniature may make it difficult to assess actual behaviors properly. To address this problem, research on the hybrid simulation is being conducted actively. This method is to implement numerical analysis on framework members that affect the general behavior of the structure dominantly through an actual scale experiment and on the rest parts by applying the substructuring technique. However, existing studies on hybrid simulation focus mainly on Slow experimental methods, which are disadvantageous in that it is unable to assess behaviors close to the actual level if material properties change depending on the speed or the influence of inertial force is significant. The present study aims to establish a Real-time hybrid simulation system capable of excitation based on the actual time history and to verify its performance and applicability. The hybrid simulation system built up in this study utilizes the ATS Compensator system, CR integrator, etc. in order to make the target displacement the same with the measured displacement on the basis of MATLAB/Simulink. The target structure was a 2-span bridge and an RC pier to support it was produced as an experimental model in order for the shaking table test and Slow and Real-time hybrid simulations. Behaviors that result from the earthquake of El Centro were examined, and the results were analyzed comparatively. In comparison with the results of the shaking table test, the Real-time hybrid simulation produced more similar maximum displacement and vibration behaviors than the Slow hybrid simulation. Hence, it is thought that the Real-time hybrid simulation proposed in this study can be utilized usefully in seismic capacity assessment of structural systems such as RC pier that are highly non-linear and time-dependent.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.62 no.5
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• pp.631-642
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• 2017

Accurate actuator tracking plays an important role in real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) to ensure accurate and reliable experimental results. Frequency-domain evaluation index (FEI) interprets actuator tracking into amplitude and phase errors thus providing a promising tool for quantitative assessment of real-time hybrid simulation results. Previous applications of FEI successfully evaluated actuator tracking over the entire duration of the tests. In this study, FEI with moving window technique is explored to provide post-experiment localized actuator tracking assessment. Both moving window with and without overlap are investigated through computational simulations. The challenge is discussed for Fourier Transform to satisfy both time domain and frequency resolution for selected length of moving window. The required data window length for accuracy is shown to depend on the natural frequency and structural nonlinearity as well as the ground motion input for both moving windows with and without overlap. Moving window without overlap shows better computational efficiency and has potential for future online evaluation. Moving window with overlap however requires much more computational efforts and is more suitable for post-experiment evaluation. Existing RTHS data from Network Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) is utilized to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. It is demonstrated that with proper window size, FEI with moving window techniques enable accurate localized evaluation of actuator tracking for real-time hybrid simulation.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.1055-1079
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• 2014

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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.1151-1172
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• 2014

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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.913-929
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• 2015

Hybrid simulation is increasingly being recognized as a powerful technique for laboratory testing. It offers the opportunity for global system evaluation of civil infrastructure systems subject to extreme dynamic loading, often with a significant reduction in time and cost. In this approach, a reference structure/system is partitioned into two or more substructures. The portion of the structural system designated as 'physical' or 'experimental' is tested in the laboratory, while other portions are replaced with a computational model. Many researchers have quite effectively used hybrid simulation (HS) and real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) methods for examination and verification of existing and new design concepts and proposed structural systems or devices. This paper provides a detailed perspective of the enabling role that HS and RTHS methods have played in advancing the practice of earthquake engineering. Herein, our focus is on investigations related to earthquake engineering, those with CURATED data available in their entirety in the NEES Data Repository.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.441-450
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• 2022

The introduction of autonomous underwater gliders (AUGs) specifically addresses the reduction of operational costs that were previously prohibited with conventional autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) using a "scaling-down" design philosophy by utilizing the characteristics of autonomous drifters to far extend operation duration and coverage. Long-duration, wide-area missions raise the cost and complexity of in-water testing for novel approaches to autonomous mission planning. As a result, a simulator that supports the rapid design, development, and testing of autonomy solutions across a wide range using software-in-the-loop simulation at faster-than-real-time speeds becomes critical. This paper describes a faster-than-real-time AUG simulator that can support high-resolution bathymetry for a wide variety of ocean environments, including ocean currents, various sensors, and vehicle dynamics. On top of the de facto standard ROS-Gazebo framework and open-sourced underwater vehicle simulation packages, features specific to AUGs for ocean mapping are developed. For vehicle dynamics, the next-generation hybrid autonomous underwater gliders (Hybrid-AUGs) operate with both the buoyancy engine and the thrusters to improve navigation for bathymetry mappings, e.g., line trajectory, are is implemented since because it can also describe conventional AUGs without the thrusters. The simulation results are validated with experiments while operating at 120 times faster than the real-time.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.1197-1220
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• 2014

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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.1081-1103
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• 2014

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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.1269-1289
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• 2014

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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2024

The investigation on vehicle-bridge coupling system (VBCS) is crucial in bridge design, bridge condition evaluation, and vehicle overload control. A real-time hybrid testing (RTHT) method for VBCS (RTHT-VBCS) is proposed in this paper for accurately and economically disclosing the dynamic performance of VBCSs. In the proposed method, one of the carriages is chosen as the experimental substructure loaded by servo-hydraulic actuator loading system in the laboratory, and the remaining carriages as well as the bridge structure are chosen as the numerical substructure numerically simulated in one computer. The numerical substructure and the experimental substructure are synchronized at their coupling points in terms of force equilibrium and deformation compatibility. Compared to the traditional iteration experimental method and the numerical simulation method, the proposed RTHT-VBCS method could not only obtain the dynamic response of VBCS, but also economically analyze various working conditions. Firstly, the theory of RTHT-VBCS is proposed. Secondly, numerical models of VBCS for RTHT method are presented. Finally, the feasibility and accuracy of the RTHT-VBCS are preliminarily validated by real-time hybrid simulations (RTHSs). It is shown that, the proposed RTHT-VBCS is feasible and shows great advantages over the traditional methods, and the proposed models can effectively represent the VBCS for RTHT method in terms of the force equilibrium and deformation compatibility at the coupling point. It is shown that the results of the single-degree-of-freedom model and the train vehicle model are match well with the referenced results. The RTHS results preliminarily prove the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed RTHT-VBCS.