Abstract
The design of complicated structures which, under accidental actions, have to fulfill a certain performance level, has been a scientific challenge with social and economic implications, particularly in the field of earthquake engineering. Experimental testing on structures would shed light to the deriving issues, however the full-scaling requirements of the specimens and the most out of date existing laboratory facilities do not facilitate it. For that reason, it is generally proposed the testing structure to be decomposed in its components and the part of scientific interest can be laboratory tested, whereas the other substructures are analytically modelled. That approach is known as hybrid simulation method (HS) and lends itself as an efficient tool in unveiling the nonlinear response of structural systems, especially when testing in full-scale is sought. The present research aims to evaluate the technical aspects of implementing a robust, advanced hybrid simulation (HS) platform, based on technological advancements and combining user friendliness and effectiveness. In addition, the capabilities of the advanced platform pave the way to future research extensions towards studying multi-physics problems beyond the field of earthquake engineering. The good performance of the updated hardware configuration of the new platform was evaluated via a series of verification tests on a pinned steel cantilever column subjected to lateral loading in its elastic and inelastic response region and finally, making use of the advanced application platform as a whole, a hybrid simulation test was carried out on an industrial piping system under earthquake excitation.
Highlights
New structures are expected to satisfy the ever-increasing performance levels and any failure in satisfying their complicated functions has significant social and economic implications
In sub-structured testing, a structure is discretized in individual components in such a way that numerical modelling is employed only for the sub-structures whose response is relatively well known through analytical tools, while the rest sub-structure (s) are physically tested in the lab [2]
A schematic depicting the strategy of hybrid simulation is shown in Figure 1, where a bridge structure is discretised into its central pier and its deck and two pairs of bearings
Summary
New structures are expected to satisfy the ever-increasing performance levels and any failure in satisfying their complicated functions has significant social and economic implications. The computational tools available fail to offer reliable models representing accurately the complicated, non-linear response of structures (e.g. cracking, residual deformation, stiffness/strength degradation, strength increase due to strain rate effects, redistribution of forces due to unforeseen actions) and it is not uncommon to see existing models being often used beyond their calibrated range of application. This is depicted in the conservatism that characterizes present codes of practice. The approach has been generalized and the term Hybrid Simulation (HS) method has prevailed, incorporating the many possible configurations of sub-structed testing [3,4,5,6]
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