A novel control strategy for reproducing the floor motions of high-rise buildings by earthquake-simulating shake tables

To enable the experimental assessment of the seismic performance of full-scale nonstructural elements with multiple engineering parameters (EDPs), a three-layer testbed named Nonstructural Element Simulator on Shake Table (NEST) has been developed. The testbed consists of three consecutive floors of steel structure. The bottom two floors provide a space to accommodate a full-scale room. To fully explore the flexibility of NEST, we propose a novel control strategy to generate the required shake table input time histories for the testbed to track the target floor motions of the buildings of interest with high accuracy. The control strategy contains two parts: an inverse dynamic compensation via simulation of feedback control systems (IDCS) algorithm and an offline iteration procedure based on a refined nonlinear numerical model of the testbed. The key aspects of the control strategy were introduced in this paper. Experimental tests were conducted to simulate the seismic responses of a full-scale office room on the 21^st floor of a 42-story high-rise building. The test results show that the proposed control strategy can reproduce the target floor motions of the building of interest with less than 20% errors within the specified frequency range.