Simulation of large-scale numerical substructure in real-time dynamic hybrid testing

A solution scheme is proposed in this paper for an existing RTDHT system to simulate large-scale finite element (FE) numerical substructures. The analysis of the FE numerical substructure is split into response analysis and signal generation tasks, and executed in two different target computers in real-time. One target computer implements the response analysis task, wherein a large time-step is used to solve the FE substructure, and another target computer implements the signal generation task, wherein an interpolation program is used to generate control signals in a small time-step to meet the input demand of the controller. By using this strategy, the scale of the FE numerical substructure simulation may be increased significantly. The proposed scheme is initially verified by two FE numerical substructure models with 98 and 1240 degrees of freedom (DOFs). Thereafter, RTDHTs of a single frame-foundation structure are implemented where the foundation, considered as the numerical substructure, is simulated by the FE model with 1240 DOFs. Good agreements between the results of the RTDHT and those from the FE analysis in ABAQUS are obtained.