• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.11-24
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• 2011

A real-time hybrid test of a 3 story-3 bay reinforced concrete frame which is divided into numerical and physical substructure models under uniaxial earthquake excitation was run using a fixed iteration implicit HHT time integration method. The first story inner non-ductile column was selected as the physical substructure model, and uniaxial earthquake excitation was applied to the numerical model until the specimen failed due to severe damage. A finite-element analysis program, Mercury, was newly developed and optimized for a real-time hybrid test. The drift ratio based on the top horizontal displacement of the physical substructure model was compared with the result of a numerical simulation by OpenSees and the result of a shaking table test. The experiment in this paper is one of the most complex real-time hybrid tests, and the description of the hardware, algorithm and models is presented in detail. If there is an improvement in the numerical model, the evaluation of the tangent stiffness matrix of the physical substructure model in the finite element analysis program and better software to reduce the computational time of the element state determination for the force-based beam-column element, then the comparison with the results of the real-time hybrid test and the shaking table test deserves to make a recommendation. In addition, for the goal of a "Numerical simulation of the complex structures under dynamic loading", the real time hybrid test has enough merit as an alternative to dynamic experiments of large and complex structures.