System Identification and Pseudo-Earthquake Excitation of a Real-Scaled 5 Story Steel Frame Structure

Abstract

The accurate identification of the dynamic response characteristics of a building structure excited by input signals such as real earthquake or wind load is essential not only for the evaluation of the safety and serviceability of the building structure, but for the verification of an analytical model used in the seismic or wind design. In the field of system identification (SI) which constructs system matrices describing the accurate input/output relationship, it is critical that input should have enough energy to excite fundamental structural modes and a good quality of output containing structural information should be measured. In this study forced vibration testing which is important for correlating the mathematical model of a structure with the real one and for evaluating the performance of the real structure was implemented. There exist various techniques available for evaluating the seismic performance using dynamic and static measurements. In this paper, full scale forced vibration tests simulating earthquake response are implemented by using a hybrid mass damper. The finite element (FE) model of the structure was analytically constructed using ANSYS and the model was updated using the results experimentally measured by the forced vibration test. Pseudo-earthquake excitation tests showed that HMD induced floor responses coincided with the earthquake induced ones which was numerically calculated based on the updated FE model.