• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.539-560
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• 2014

Shaking tables are devices for testing structures or structural components models with a wide range of synthetic ground motions or real recorded earthquakes. They are essential tools in earthquake engineering research since they simulate the effects of the true inertial forces on the test specimens. The destructive earthquakes that occurred at the north part of Algeria during the period of 1954-2003 resulted in an initiative from the Algerian authorities for the construction of a shaking simulator at the National Earthquake Engineering Research Center, CGS. The acceleration tracking performance and specifically the inability of the earthquake simulator to accurately replicate the input signal can be considered as the main challenge during shaking table test. The objective of this study is to validate the uni-axial sinusoidal performances curves and to assess the accuracy and fidelity in signal reproduction using the advanced adaptive control techniques incorporated into the MTS Digital controller and software of the CGS shaking table. A set of shake table tests using harmonic and earthquake acceleration records as reference/commanded signals were performed for four test configurations: bare table, 60 t rigid mass and two 20 t elastic specimens with natural frequencies of 5 Hz and 10 Hz.