Robust hybrid simulation with improved fidelity: Theory, methodology, and implementation

Ge Ou, Purdue University

Abstract

Civil engineers of today have been charged with the task of providing resilient and sustainable infrastructure designs, and to use those for establishing resilient communities. To achieve this mission, improved designs, new materials, and efficient retrofit strategies are being introduced around the world. Before many of these techniques are used in the real world, efficient methods are needed to evaluate the performance of those innovations through high fidelity experimentation. Hybrid simulation is an integrated, numerical-experimental method that combines the benefits of simulation with component-level experiments. In hybrid simulation, the structural components which are difficult to model are constructed physically (named the experimental substructure) while the rest of the structure is computationally modeled in a simulation (named the numerical substructure). During hybrid simulation, the boundary condition information between the numerical substructure and experimental substructure is exchanged at each numerical substructure integration step. In this dissertation, robust solutions to the challenges associated with this powerful numerical-experimental method are considered. The objective of this dissertation is to advance the state of the art in hybrid simulation. First, a robust platform for hybrid simulation running in real time is developed that considers the complex interactions between various components of the physical-computational system. Next, to improve the fidelity of hybrid simulations that contain numerical elements that are similar to the physical specimen, online system identification is integrated into hybrid simulation. The improvement of fidelity through hybrid simulation with model updating is illustrated through the model updating performance as well as a global assessment by comparing to the shake table test results.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Dyke, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Architectural|Civil engineering

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