• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.137-154
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• 2014

Servohydraulic shaking tables are being increasingly used in the field of earthquake engineering. They play a critical role in the advancement of the research state and remain one of the valuable tools for seismic testing. Recently, the National Earthquake Engineering Research Center, CGS, has acquired a 6.1m x 6.1 m shaking table system which has a six degree-of-freedom testing capability. The maximum specimen mass that can be tested on the shaking table is 60 t. This facility is designed specially for testing a complete civil engineering structures, substructures and structural elements up to collapse or ultimate limit states. It can also be used for qualification testing of industrial equipments. The current paper presents the main findings of the experimental shake-down characterization testing of the CGS shaking table. The test program carried out in this study included random white noise and harmonic tests. These tests were performed along each of the six degrees of freedom, three translations and three rotations. This investigation provides fundamental parameters that are required and essential while elaborating a realistic model of the CGS shaking table. Also presented in this paper, is the numerical model of the shaking table that was established and validated.